This article looks at how you can get more video views, likes and shares on your social media channels. To help demonstrate how effective videos can be on social media, we filmed and edited a short clip and posted it on our own social media channels as an experiment. As you are about to see, the results are exceptional, below we will run through a few of our key recommendations for making the best use of your videos on social media.

You might be wondering what the benefits of using video on social media are, well to put it simply, video content often outperforms text or image based content because it is more eye catching. Because it stands out amongst more traditional static media, the audience are more likely to notice it, consume it and hopefully engage with it.

All of the top social media platforms know that video content is more likely to be consumed than posts with photos or lengthy text, therefore they write algorithms to promote any video content to the top of peoples feeds, essentially prioritising video content and making it even more likely that the audience will see it.

It is because of this prioritisation that we highly recommend video content as part of any good digital content and social media strategy. But just creating a video, posting it and leave it to do it’s own thing will not get your results. As our experiment below shows, putting in a little bit of extra effort to share the video around can have amazing results.

To demonstrate how to get more views, likes and shares on a video on social media, we produced our own short video of a walk through our local nature reserve in Stony Stratford, Bognor Regis. The video was shot and edited in just a few hours, we deliberately waited for a nice sunny day and headed for some beautiful scenery to make our video even more eye catching.

The first step was to post the video we created on our social media pages, we decided to post the video to our Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts, with some accompanying text and hashtags. If we had stopped there then the video would have got a few views from people who already like or follow our accounts, plus a few extra from people searching the relevant hashtags. We wanted to increase the reach, views, shares and likes though and here’s how we did it.

First of all we researched some relevant pages and groups on Facebook that were relevant to the video content, by which we mean they might be interested in watching the video. As our video was a walk through a nature reserve in Stony Stratford we found local community groups and pages, as well as The Parks Trust who manage the parks in Bognor Regis.

Next we liked these pages and joined the groups and posted the videos to the pages, this usually has limited success. Some people will see the content, but others will miss it as it can get buried among other posts on the page or group. One way to guarantee a better reach is to send a message to the page or group admins and ask if they will post the content for you, ideally by sharing the link to the original video on your page, but if not you can provide them the video file to share directly. In our example the LoveStony page with over 7,000 followers posted the link to our video and The Parks Trust page with over 13,000 followers posted our video directly with a credit to our business page. We also posted it directly in a number of other relevant community groups and pages.

After carrying out all of the above steps, here are the overall results of our efforts and this is just for Facebook:

• 16,280 people reached
• 4,900 views
• 795 engagements
• 211 likes/loves
• 40 comments
• 39 shares
• 367 clicks

The video also received lots more views and engagements on Twitter and Instagram, but our main focus was on Facebook as this has the best community based format for sharing the video content. If you would like to find out more about our video production or social media management services, please visit our services page.