Long form video content may be the key to social media marketing that produces fresh content nearly every day.
Finding the time to produce content for social channels, let alone post it, adjust it, find new trends, and ensure the content is engaging with your audience can be a full-time job.
That is why a lot of social media strategies for small businesses are simple, like ‘post three times a day’ no matter what it is, or post once a week.
But if you’re wanting to take your social media game to the next level, one social media strategy can help you turn out new content quickly.
One of the main ways of doing that is through repurposing. No, I don’t mean finding someone else’s content and copying it, that’s plagiarism.
We mean, produce long form video content, and break it down into smaller breadcrumbs that are new content, but from something you already produced.
It’s getting more mileage out of your video content. And that will ultimately save you time and money on your social media marketing efforts.
Let’s break down the steps in taking long form video content, and turning it into an endless library of video content we can post for weeks.
Cut up long form video content into short form
Video content is massively successful on social media. Short form video is where the money is. 81% of consumers want to see short form videos from brands in 2024.
TikTok is obviously built on short form video content, Instagram has reels, Youtube has shorts, and even Facebook has stories. Short form videos are literally everywhere.
And it makes sense, as people’s attention span can watch a 40 second clip compared to a 40 minute, long form video.
But that doesn’t mean long form doesn’t have a place in your social media strategy. In fact, you can use one long form video to make dozens of short form videos, pretty quickly.
Successful video podcaster Chris Van Vilet has promoted this strategy many times, and despite him being mainly an entertainment podcaster, it’s a sound strategy for businesses to use as well.
This is a great social media strategy for small businesses because it’s something you can do relatively quickly, and produce a lot of content.
Yes, there is an entry-level point to this, because you need to be able to create video. But with our phones being video cameras now, and webcams and recording cameras being easy to get, it’s a cheap investment.
There are even cheap options for video editing software, including Camtasia, which is free.
To get started, we need our long form video.
Step 1: Create long form video
To start this strategy, you need to create a long form video. This can take many different forms, such as:
- Product demos
- Interviews
- Education videos
- Walkthroughs and guides
- Webinars
It can be as simple as showing off your merchandise in your store, or explaining how you perform a service, the benefits of it, and the value to your customers.
This video is going to be roughly 40 to 60 minutes long, and it needs to be highly valuable content. You want people to watch this video. In fact, that’s the end goal of this social media strategy, to get viewership high on this long form video.
Someone who watches a longer video would be considered a hot lead, as that’s a lot of time to dedicate to one business.
When producing this video, think of it in chunks, because we’re going to cut it up. So, if you’re showing products, ensure you show four to five different products. If you’re giving a webinar, make sure to have a good number of sections.
That’s because we’re going to start making more content from this long form video. Or rather, repurposing it. And this is where you save time.
Step 2: Cut it down into smaller segments
Once we have completed the 40 to 60 minute version of the long form video, we’re now going to cut it down into around five to eight medium-sized videos, ranging in length from 3-10 minutes.
Each one of these videos should be able to stand alone on their own without context of the much larger video. But, it should entice people enough that they may want to watch the long form video you created.
It also narrows down your focus when posting on social media channels. If you did a product demo of 10 different products, you now have 10 smaller videos of each individual product.
This gives you very targeted video content that you can use on webpages, social channels, or even send directly to potential customers.
You also now have 11 videos in your content library.
Step 3: Make shorts and reels
From our collection of medium-sized videos, we’re now going to cut them down even shorter.
Reels and shorts are highly successful on platforms such as Instagram. Sprout Social found that reels generate 2x more reach than any other types of content on Instagram, with an average reach of 30.81%.
More importantly, 50% of Instagram users have visited a website to buy a product or service after seeing it in their stories. That’s exactly why we do this social media strategy for small businesses – to get more customers.
We’ll take our medium sized videos that are four minutes long, and now find snippets of 30-40 seconds of content. We want things like:
- great quotes
- interesting stories or anecdotes
- final reveals
- before and after
The goal would be, out of a four minute medium-size video to get at least three short-video stories or reels from it. These are the videos we’re going to post to platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and Facebook that will get a lot of views.
It may seem difficult at first to cut down videos into meaningful reels, but properly thinking out your long form video will aid in your attempts to cut down shorter videos.
You can tell a unique story about the product, a use case, a benefit and value proposition, and all within four minutes, and then cut each down into a single reel.
Step 4: Creating a content calendar of video
From one hour long form video, we now have a library of content to use on social media. This is what makes this a highly effective social media strategy for small businesses, because you can get a lot of content very quickly.
If we took that hour-long video, cut it into eight medium-sized videos, and cut those down into three reels, we now have a library of 33 different types of video content.
All from one hour of filming.
Now we’re armed with content and ready to build a content calendar. How often you post will be based on the platform you choose. Some range from a few times a week, while others require multiple times per day.
I suggest picking one main channel and one secondary channel. Any more than that, you may need to edit too many different sizes of video and it will just take more time.
For this social media strategy, we’ll use Instagram, which would need about three to five posts per week, and roughly two stories a day.
If we just focus on posts, Instagram allows for videos of any length up to 60 minutes to be posted, but anything longer than 60 seconds will generate a preview. So that means, we can use all of our video library.
At three posts a week, posting Monday-Wednesday-Friday, it would take us 11 weeks to use up every video we created.
Imagine that, 11 weeks of social media content from a single hour of video.
Even if we just used the short form video content, so the 24 reels we created, that’s eight weeks of three-times a week posting on Instagram.
That’s the power of this long form video social media strategy. It allows you to create a lot of video content quickly, without having to create each individual video.
To go a step further, we can use the short reels as stories each day as well. If we take just the 24 reels we created, and mix and match them, there are 276 combinations.
Gain more mileage out of your long form video
By using this long form video social media strategy and turning it into shorter reels, I’ve shown you how you can quickly build a content library.
Where you can really take advantage of this strategy is when you start doing it multiple times weaving your different video content together.
While one long form video cut up into shorter reels can take you anywhere from 8-11 weeks in a content calendar, two quickly gets you to 16-22 weeks. Three has you covering over half a year.
This reduces the amount of work you have to do on your social media planning, as you can make a handful of long form videos in a year, and repurpose them into short form videos that cover the entire calendar year.
That’s why it’s so important that the long form videos are informative and are simply good content. Because we’re going to break them down as much as possible to get a longer life out of them.
Quickly, by just doing three long form videos, you can have upwards of 90-100 videos in your library. And now you can use those through the year as content across multiple channels.
Planning your next social media strategy for your small business
This strategy will not only give you a library of video content to use, but it will also enhance your reach across your social media channels.
Video is such a powerful piece of content, that I even use this strategy as part of our own marketing efforts because it simply works.
Let’s talk about how we can help you produce your own long form video, and break it down into all the reels and stories you could ever need.