Turning mobile video into a marketing star for your business

With more than 14 million South Africans a month coming to Facebook on mobile, this is a golden opportunity for businesses to engage with their customers and prospects. Researchers at Facebook and beyond have found that mobile activity is strikingly frequent and fast:

• People scroll through mobile news feed 41% faster than desktop news feed.
• People can remember what they see on mobile after only a quarter of a second or less.

Nunu Ntshingila

If advertisers want to reach people, however, they need to earn their attention. Here are some ways that you can make mobile video work harder for your business and engage with your community.

Capture attention quickly.

People make speedy decisions about what they want to watch, and this is especially true in mobile feeds. The faster you capture attention in video adverts, the better.

• Consider delivering your message in 15 seconds or less. By matching people's attention on mobile, you can increase how often your video adverts are watched all the way through.
• Start with your most captivating elements. Hook people right away with great thumbnails, vivid backgrounds and stunning product shots.
• Incorporate your brand message and identity early. If your brand is tied to a recognisable celebrity, character or symbol, let people know right away. Put your hero front and centre.
• Use engaging post copy. Strengthen your visuals with funny, provocative or surprising copy.

Build for sound off. Delight with sound on.

People often consume video on their mobile in public with no sound, so design your video accordingly. Your video adverts should communicate clearly without sound, but get better or funnier with sound on.

• Tell your story visually. Sight and motion are the heart of feed, so make the most of them.
• Use text and graphics. Words and symbols can make your message easier to understand when someone is watching without sound.
• Add captions. Internal tests showed that adding captions to video adverts increased video view duration by an average of 12%.
• Include a sound file. People expect to hear audio when they turn on their volume.

Frame your visual story.

TVs and desktops may use horizontal frames, but industry research suggests that mobile phones are used in portrait mode 98% of the time. As people spend more and more time on mobile, how do you make the most of a smaller, vertical frame?

• Use vertical video. Most people hold their phones vertically, so horizontal videos don't maximise the screen space. Try using taller videos with 4:5 or 9:16 ratios.
• Highlight the key elements. Keep your product front and centre and visually emphasise the qualities that make your brand valuable.
• Create visual surprises. Even in a small frame, what optical illusions or unexpected events can you include?

Test, iterate and learn.

Where traditional brand advertisers used to test just a few pieces of creative, today's best-performing video advertisers use thousands of video variants and test them on a much more frequent basis. Facebook VP of Core Adverts, Mark Rabkin, recommends testing and measuring adverts on a weekly cycle rather than the former standard of every six months. The more you know about your audience, the better work you'll create.

Be playful and curious

There's no one-size-fits-all way to make great mobile video adverts – different audiences respond to different things. That's why we recommend an approach of curiosity and playfulness.

• Experiment to learn. Try out different video styles and fresh copy, and see what works.
• Tell your story as quickly as you can while still getting your core message across. On mobile, you can do so much in less than 15 seconds.
• Different forms of video can attract people's attention – like Canvas, our full-screen experience that serves fast-loading, microsite-like experiences. Don't be afraid to try something new.