How to Increase Video Viewership and Engagement: Part One
Whatever your message may be, video is an excellent tool for getting your point across. To make the most of the medium, we recommend incorporating the latest market research when designing your corporate video strategy.
Besides thinking about your audience and message goals, understanding viewing habits helps in content development. The two primary metrics to help you analyze your video’s performance are video play rate and video engagement rate:
Video play rate is the percentage of website visitors who press play on a video rather than just scrolling past it.
Longer videos have a greater play rate (50% for 30–60-minute videos), likely because websites with longer videos tend to be more specialized and receive fewer, more targeted visitors.
Overall video play rates are 19% for small and medium companies and 16% for large companies.
The industries with the highest play rates are education and media (46% and 44%, respectively). The healthcare, services, e-commerce, and financial sectors have the lowest video play rates at 11–13%.
Video engagement rate, on the other hand, refers to the percentage of the video that a viewer watches after pressing play.
Shorter videos with durations of 5 minutes or less have the highest engagement rate (about 50%).
In general, the longer the video, the lower the engagement rate. So while longer videos may be more likely to entice a user to play, they are less likely to be watched all the way through.
Now that you know the typical numbers, how can you optimize your results? To be successful, you must know your objectives:
(1) Make your audience click ‘play.’
(2) Maintain their attention so they keep watching!
In part one of our video viewership and engagement series, we’ll go over how to get your audience to press ‘play’.
Eye-Catching Thumbnails
Wistia reports that videos with custom thumbnails receive a 7% boost in play rate.
When you embed a video to your website from a host such as Vimeo or YouTube, the host site will typically auto-generate a thumbnail. However, this will not always feature the most compelling frame and does not allow you to further customize the image.
For a video thumbnail that piques your viewers’ interest, use a high-resolution still from your video featuring a product close-up, a friendly face, an exciting action shot, or a colorful graphic.
To really make your thumbnail pop, add some bold text to punctuate the image. Our go-to program for graphics is Adobe Illustrator, but there are many thumbnail editors (like Canva) available for free online.
2. Keep It on Top
No matter the quality of your video or the boldness of your thumbnail, your video will never get any clicks if it is buried at the bottom of your webpage! Generally, the higher up on a page a video is and the larger the video player appears, the more likely your website visitor is to come across it.
When designing your website, look for web players that have prominent player controls so that your website visitors know to click. Another feature to look for is the ability to embed your logo into the corner of each video to help boost brand awareness. Check out our portfolio page for an example!
3. Post on Social Media
Even if someone doesn’t visit your page directly, posting a full or abridged version of your video to social media is another way to reach them. When posting to social media, be it LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram, be strategic about when you post.
According to a recent report by Hootsuite, the optimal times to post on social media are as follows:
Facebook: Saturday, 7 am
Instagram: Wednesday, 11 am
LinkedIn: Weekdays, 7 am - 8 pm
In Part Two of this series, we’ll discuss how to keep your audience tuned in and the importance of understanding their viewing habits.
