More of us are watching video online, but attention spans are slipping. What can you do to ensure your video is watched until the end?
As the second biggest search engine, YouTube is a fantastic platform for companies to advertise their services, promote their products and share their values. For many people, creating an online video is an opportunity to put as much information forward as possible – after all, you’re essentially buying time in the biggest ad break in the world.
Although it is important to get your message across, it’s easy to get carried away with the amount of information to share in one video, and this inevitably leads to a longer duration.
Whilst it’s great that more people are watching online video, corporate video has changed. In a world of 140 characters and 6 second videos, audiences are impatient, easily bored, and can quickly click on something else that sparks their interest. We’re all guilty of it.
When you look at the stats, it’s staggering how short our attention spans are becoming. Recent research surrounding online video viewing habits showed that more than half of viewers give up on a video after 60 seconds, and many click elsewhere after just 10 seconds. This means that your online videos need to grab the viewers attention and get to the point faster than ever.
In the past, business videos have been approached like a factual television program. Lots of information and plenty of interviews leading to a key message with a good deal of on-screen text to read through. Not to say that this approach was wrong, in the past people were more likely to watch a 10 minute corporate video, but now things are changing.
One of the challenges of making online videos for your company is staying objective, but it’s important to take a step back and watch your corporate video as though you are a first-time viewer.
Try imagining watching your video whilst you’re sitting at home on your tablet or iPhone. The TV is on in the background, you’ve got people chatting around you and you’ve got various messages popping up whilst you watch. Is the video able to grab your attention? Would you continue reading the on-screen text with all these distractions surrounding you?
Watching it back like this will help you to improve your video and ultimately make it more engaging for viewers.
Another thing to consider is how easy it is to stream and share your video. In 2012, a study showed that 20% of viewers give up on a video if it doesn’t load in 5 seconds, and this is bound to have increased in the past year.
By ensuring that your video isn’t too long, it is likely to load and buffer quickly, meaning that more people will be able to watch it.
The key thing is to keep your video short and interesting. If you’re able to get across your key messages in an engaging way, then viewers are likely to not only watch your video in it’s entirety, but also share it across social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, meaning a bigger viewership in the long run.
To get ahead of the curve and start making mobile-friendly online video content, get in touch with the Holler team on 020 7112 8665.