Facebook video ads: catch the wave

By Molly Parker, Social Account Coordinator

Facebook has been pushing video for some time now. You can now use video in almost any type of ad unit that Facebook offers. Videos are engaging and help you tell your story, and Facebook provides a large platform and incredible layers of targeting.

Video on Facebook is especially helpful for a company planning on running video on TV. Facebook is a good place to test video first and see how it will perform. With all of the great targeting that Facebook has, you can target the channels and types of viewers you will be airing to on TV. You can get a sense of reach and a sense of what conversions will cost. You can test different videos to determine which is most likely to perform well on TV, while monitoring engagement metrics and view-through conversions.

(Going off those lines, if you already have video assets you are using for your website or anything else, it should be relatively simple to create a 30-second cut to use on Facebook.)

Video Ad Best Practices

• Video should be no longer than 30 seconds on mobile and 60 seconds on desktop.
• Video should capture the audience’s attention within the first five seconds.
• It’s important to keep in mind that most of the time, sound is off, so video must be engaging without sound. Adding in some subtitles or text is a good idea.
• You can save audiences of people who viewed your video and people who viewed to completion and use this for retargeting later on.
• Video creative can be used for almost all Facebook objectives.

Facebook for Direct Response

With Facebook’s great targeting tools, you can target a large audience, then save an audience of people who view your video and an audience of people who viewed the video to completion. If these audiences are large enough, you can retarget them later with a direct-response ad. These users will already be familiar with your brand and be more likely to convert.

Many advertisers want to test video, but we all know it can be expensive to create these assets. Facebook recently also rolled out Slideshow, their “lightweight video.” You can create a 5-15 second slideshow with 3-7 photos and layer in some text to tell a story. This is also a great way to reach people who are using basic devices or have poor connectivity where video ads may not work.