Uploading your music video to Facebook isn’t the same as uploading it to YouTube. Here are five things you’ll need to bear in mind.

Trim The Fat

The average watch time for all videos on Facebook is about 8 seconds.  Yikes! If your video is for a song and the vocals don’t start until say twenty seconds in, a lot of people won’t get that far.  When uploading to Facebook, clip the video until just before the vocals kick in (or the main riff or whatever) so the action starts straight away.

Grab Their Attention

You’ve got a couple of seconds as people scroll through their Facebook news feed to intrigue/dazzle somebody so that they click and watch and not scroll past to watch the cat video that’s below you!  Start with a ‘scroll stopper’, a strong visual opening to the video that is going to catch their eye.

Choose Your Thumbnail

If you’re going to boost or run the video as an ad, Facebook doesn’t like text in the thumbnail so keep them text free. Choose a thumbnail that is engaging/eye catching also.

Get Your Copy Right

When musicians post videos I often see “Here’s the video for  my latest single, it’s available today on Apple Music, Spotify, iTunes and Soundcloud etc.” That describe what the music is about and it doesn’t encourage anybody to listen.

Consider the themes of the song and write copy that will connect and resonate and encourage them to click. I had a new single out last week, uploaded the video with the text “This song’s for you if you’re absolutely broke”.  If people sympathise with that statement they will be more encouraged to click and watch. Mystery and intrigue in your copy will work well.  You can always run a little retargeting ad spend to people who watched say more than 50% of the video with all the deets as to where they can consume it outside of Facebook.

Make It Quality

Annoyingly, Facebook now defaults playback on mobiles as SD (or what I’d call LOW quality!). Maybe that’s to save people’s mobile data, maybe it’s to ease the burden on their servers.  You might want to put ‘Click HD for best sound” in your post text if sound/picture quality is important for you.

Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?

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