While some media companies have tried and failed in the past to axe everything else in favor of video, it is true that short-form video format has taken over the internet in the last few years. This is particularly true with the pandemic-fueled rise of TikTok and how that’s influenced Facebook and Instagram, who have explicitly stated their intention for the algorithm to prioritize video.

Regardless of how you feel about how this affects your personal user experience, there’s no way around the fact that it means video is now much more important for digital advertising than it used to be.

The somewhat dystopian truth is that “the algorithm” runs so much of the internet now, and that, if you’re trying to market your business, you have to be aware of that and adapt accordingly. Whether paid or organic, in the current climate, video:

• Offers more reach
• Drives more engagement
• Is given more opportunities to grab people’s attention

In other words, if it’s within your capabilities, video format can be a massive boon to your digital marketing efforts. While organic videos and paid video advertising are both beneficial, here we’ll focus on paid ads, specifically. For starters:

A quick look at the types of Facebook and Instagram video ads

Although there’s a decent amount of overlap between the two, we’ll start with Facebook. They are, in no particular order:

• Facebook feed video ads
• Facebook in-stream video ads
• Facebook stories video ads
• Facebook marketplace video ads

And on Instagram:

• Instagram reels ads
• Instagram in-stream ads
• Instagram stories ads
• Instagram shop ads
• Instagram explore ads

As you can infer, the first four types on each platform at least roughly correspond with each other. Instagram reels ads are effectively the Instagram version of Facebook’s video ads in your feed, stories are stories, shop is marketplace, and so on. The one difference is ads in Instagram’s Explore section, which is the part of the platform where you can browse below when you go to search for something.

Sprout Social has a more in-depth look at the different types of video ads if you’d like to learn more, but otherwise, we’re going to go straight to…

Running and designing video ads: Best practices for Facebook, Instagram, and both

Many of the philosophies behind these best practices aren’t even specific to Facebook, Instagram, or indeed video itself; rather, some of this is simply applying universally true practices to video and Meta-specific settings.

This includes, for example, keeping in mind audience attention spans and, for lack of better words, laziness. We use “laziness” without any judgment — we’re all lazy on the internet, at least most of the time. We have to be — we’re constantly bombarded with content, much of which we don’t want in our faces, so it’s absurd to expect someone to interact with your content with particular care.

Unless you prove a user otherwise, they have no reason to pay any attention to you. Remember that.

Accordingly, you should assume people won’t watch past the first couple of seconds unless you give them a compelling reason to. You should also assume most people won’t unmute your videos.

To address the latter, caption your videos. You’ve probably already noticed this trend.

Regarding people’s short attention spans, in many ways, this should be addressed via the more universal principles we addressed above. We all learned in seventh-grade English about establishing a hook in your essays right off the bat, right? Yeah, that’s no different here.

For one, your ads should be pretty short in length anyway — trim the fat, you’re not making a Lord of the Rings trilogy. But even more important, they should have something to grab a viewer’s attention from the get-go. Particularly if your ad has a logical appeal, identify the problem — then show why you are the solution. (And this is still true for the implicit messaging, even if you’re not appealing to logic.)

Along with establishing a hook within a couple of seconds, this also means featuring your product or brand early on. You could start with a hook that’s genuinely effective and piques users’ interest, but that only buys you so much time; if you then spend a minute after that not getting to the point or leaving the viewer going “Okay, what is this for though,” they’ll leave.

Similarly — even more important in certain cases like the Instagram explore ads — put thought into the thumbnail for your video ad that’s displayed before it begins playing. You see this, especially on YouTube, but it’s true for these shorter-form videos as well. How and why does this image (and any text that might accompany it) draw people in?

Image Source: Facebook.com

Lastly in this vein, users neither need nor are compelled by a Billy Mays-style “Here’s why this product is the last face lotion/workout pant/combination Roomba-jet ski you’ll ever need!” pitch. Don’t hammer people in the face with the advertising — doing so is generally not very engaging and often just alienates users versus a more organic-appearing video.

Then you have the more technical and specs-based best practices. These include:

• Formatting: Your videos should be in a vertical or square format, which presents far better than ones shot horizontally. At this point, this is just considered the visual standard on these platforms whether for advertising or organic, so it’s something to just always default to unless you have a very deliberate reason not to, which would be extraordinarily rare.

• CTA: Make it clear, make it stand out, make it good all around. Just like… well, all CTAs, really.

Image Source: sproutsocial.com

• Landing page: Wherever the CTA goes, it should be optimized for mobile view. The vast majority of both Instagram and Facebook users are accessing these platforms on their phones. That means they’ll arrive at your landing page on their phones. If your landing page is a cluster for people on their phones and they subsequently have an awful, unnavigable user experience, they’re gonna abandon it pretty quickly.

• Testing: Just like with everything in online marketing, test often and create a variety of media to test with. Playing around with multiple video ads will give you some insight that you otherwise wouldn’t have, sometimes insights you wouldn’t even think to consider.

Image Source: wordstream.com

• Loopability: This might seem a little like minutiae — and it kind of is — but videos that automatically replay upon completion get more engagement and allow viewers to recall more information than they would otherwise, even sometimes from just rewatching a few more seconds.

By keeping these best practices in mind, you’ll help build a healthy foundation for your video advertising. This is hardly an exhaustive list of “Do this and you’ll become an overnight success,” but these are really solid baselines upon which to build. Starting with these practices will give you a good foundation, and from there you can discover even more creative, engaging ways to build an audience.