This article provides the ultimate guide to enhancing your social snippets. We’ll teach you the features that will make your content pop and the common mistakes to avoid! We cover storytelling, content repurposing, visual and audio effects, SEO optimization and the latest trends in AI content generation to help you take your snippets to the next level.
Snippet (noun). A small piece or brief extract.
Social snippet (compound noun). A micro-video that can skyrocket your brand to success.
What is a social snippet video?
A social snippet is a short-form video, usually taken from a longer piece. The length of these videos can vary, depending on the intended purpose. However, they are often presented in micro-format such as on Instagram and Facebook reels, YouTube shorts, and TikTok videos. Short-form videos are snappy, to the point and a marketing hit! 92% of marketers report that video snippets give a positive ROI, and 89% of consumers admitting that video content has swayed them to make a purchase.
How can I maximize my social snippet success?
Create standalone content to reel in your audience, hook, bait, line and sinker.
Short-form videos don’t leave a lot of time to get your message across. Some creators try to solve this by making a series of snippets that only tell a story when viewed together. The problem is that, more often than not, your audience will be shown just one of these snippets, and in no particular order.
For this reason, each snippet needs to stand entirely on its own, and should tell a complete story. You probably remember the basics of storytelling from elementary school: beginning, middle, complication and resolution. You need to pack all of this into a snippet, every single time. This is easier than it sounds using the hook, bait, line, and sinker approach.
Step #1: The hook. The hook is what compels the viewer to stop scrolling and watch the rest of your video. This can be in the form of a rhetorical question, a bold statement, or by hinting that you have secret knowledge to share.
Step #2: The bait. Now that your audience has taken the bait. You need to continue reeling them in by answering your rhetorical question, justifying your bold statement, or telling them your secret.
Step #3: The line. You then need to show how you, your product, or your company can provide a solution to their problem.
Step #4: The sinker. This is your call to action, and every snippet must have one. The purpose is to direct your audience where you want them to go. The most common way to do this is to get them to hit the ‘follow’, ‘like’, or ‘subscribe’ button. We recommend this for the snippet format, because it doesn’t put pressure on the viewer (unlike a direct purchase request), and you’ll be increasing your incidental exposure.
The average viewer needs to see a product at least 7 times before they’re comfortable enough to make a purchase. Encouraging them to ‘hit the subscribe button’ is the perfect way to get you or your product into their regular feed and build trust.This is your ticket to catching the biggest fish.
Maximize your snippet’s visual and audio appeal
According to Wyzowl 3.7 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every single day. So, it’s really important that YOUR video snippets stand out from the crowd.
You can maximize your snippet’s appeal by making sure it’s accompanied by appropriate images, captions, music and sounds. If you’re talking about dating advice, for example, why not try adding a stock image of a busy bar in the background? Or, if you’re selling a CRM targeting realtors, perhaps a house with a sold sign? You can also rotate these background images throughout the snippet to hold interest.
Another way to hold interest is to use on-screen text to emphasize your key points. If you want to make three key points, highlight them on the screen, you can even change font colors or add stickers, gifs, or animations to emphasize keywords.
Finally, even if you’ve nailed the visuals. Don’t forget about the audio. While just speaking can work in some circumstances, adding on-trend music, or even one-off sounds can also attract attention.
Check out how content creator Erika Kullberg (1.27M subscribers) implements some of these suggestions:
Create killer social snippets by repurposing what you already have
There’s a place for fresh content. Perhaps your business is posting live from an important conference, or you want to post from a live sporting game. To stay relevant, your content calendar can and should leave some wiggle room for the unexpected. However, the most successful content creators post videos every single day, so you can’t leave your content to spontaneous chance. Planning a content calendar, and creating and editing 30 new videos a month is a really time consuming process, requiring creativity, planning and forethought.
Thankfully, there’s an easy solution. You’re likely already sitting on a lot of long-form video content. Perhaps you’ve done a great webinar, or been a keynote speaker at a conference, perhaps your company has a branding video, or you’ve hosted a podcast, or uploaded videos to YouTube. Wonderful! Each of these can and should be broken down into dozens of repurposed content pieces! There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, simply take stock of what you already have and work that into your content strategy.
See how financial guru Ramit Sethi repurposes his hour-long YouTube videos into effective shorts.
Post your video snippet to every available platform
If you’re only posting to one or two platforms, you are limiting your own exposure. It doesn’t take much extra effort to post the same video onto multiple platforms. Post your content on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook. EVERYWHERE! This is a simple way to build your audience. Just remember to adjust the aspect-ratios to make sure the content always looks perfect. (Psst…we’ll talk more about how to automatically adjust ratios at the end of this article).
Use SEO techniques to optimize your snippet’s performance
You wouldn’t write a blog post or article without an agenda. Your agenda might be brand awareness, or user education, or to improve search engine rankings, or all three. The same should be true for your social snippets. Your videos should feature key words in several places: in the video’s title, within the video itself (either verbally or via text on screen), and in your video’s description…and don’t forget to hashtag, hashtag, hashtag.
If you’re not sure what keywords to use, you can use professional tools like Semrush but, if you don’t have the budget, you can also get ideas from competitor’s videos with high engagement or view counts. Simply click on them and see what keywords and hashtags they’re using. There’s nothing wrong with learning from the success of others.
You can also analyze your channel and individual videos using tools like YouTube studio to see if there are any common patterns. Viewing this data will help you understand which snippets your audience is loving, and which ones they’re passing on. You can use that data to make improvements to your next round of content.
See how, Semrush, uses these techniques in every social snippet they upload:
Utilize the RIGHT AI technology
So far we’ve outlined some of the key tools for social snippet success: storified content, great audio and visual features, building a social calendar out of repurposed content, and optimizing for growth by using the right keywords and hashtags. But there is still one glaring problem. Doing all this manually takes A LOT of time, effort, skill, and resources. Especially if you’re aiming for that audience-maximizing daily upload.
Thankfully, by utilizing the RIGHT AI technology your social snippets can pretty much create themselves! GlossAi’s patent-pending AI content generator can repurpose each of your long-form videos into dozens of different content pieces. As the most human-like editor on the market it’s been trained to analyze movement, volume and tone fluctuations to automatically find and extract video highlights. This means that, unlike other AI content generators, it’s intelligent and precise enough to create snippets that are already storified.
GlossAi also has easy-to-use inbuilt editing software, just in case you want to make any changes, and you can even incorporate your brand book, to create brand-aligned snippets that feature your company’s fonts, color, and even logos. It’s also a cinch to add in images,stickers, gifs, music, sounds and anything else you might like to make your videos truly pop. And when you’re ready to upload. Hey presto! The platform will auto-adjust each video to fit the aspect ratios of each social media platform. It can even auto-generate compelling content descriptions so you don’t have to! As a bonus, GlossAi’s content generator learns your preferences and saves them for future projects, saving you time and helping you create consistently on-brand content.
To see GlossAi in action, click on the video below. And get your first three hours of content generated for free by clicking on the link here.