We look at five ways that different news sites are using social media to tell, explain, and promote stories on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.
Video is eating the media world.
We see it in the social data that we constantly collect in our monthly rankings, and the heavily-shared stories that fly to the top of Spike every hour.
According to Pew Research, about six in ten American adults (63%) watch video online, and over half of those – 36% – watch news videos online.  This growth is directly related to the rise in smartphone ownership, another factor that news sites are adapting to.
Spike allows us to see what videos are getting social attention quickly, using its powerful video filter. It shows what footage is getting tweeted, shared, and talked about in real time. Many of the most shared stories every day have strong video components.
With this in mind, we decided to take a closer look at some of the more inventive strategies that sites are employing to make the most out of video in telling the news and promoting their stories.
1) Treat Facebook as a TV Channel
With Facebook gaining more and more power as a video platform in its own right, traditional broadcasters are waking up to the potential that the network has for reaching new audiences.
Just as traditional print publishers now look at the News Feed as their new front page, broadcasters and other media producers are looking at it as their own TV channel.
Fox News, NBC, CNN and Sky News are all examples of broadcasters that are posting some of the best of their work directly to Facebook, where a new view counter frequently shows millions of views on short news clips.
Advantages to posting directly to Facebook’s player include reaching an extremely wide audience, ensuring a fast route to virality, as well as a way of stamping ‘social ownership’ over viral TV clips.
But what if the segments were made for Facebook in the first place?
Now This News uses very short video clips to great effect on their Facebook page.
Through their app, subscribers get bursts of short, news-related clips throughout the day. The social news outlet show what can be done with time limitations.
NTN producers use Spike to figure out what stories they should be covering on any given day.
“We probably source 3-6 stories per day from Spike. Often using the video only button. We’ve had several occasions where we are earlier to a story because of Spike,” says producer Sarah Frank.
(NTN also have a neat feature on their Twitter videos – a panel in the corner of the video preview, showing the exact length of the clip, before the user decides to press play.)
BuzzFeed has rapidly expanded its video arm this year. They now post entertainment videos directly to their Facebook pages, where the short segments make use of Facebook’s video autoplay feature, frequently attracting enviable engagement on News Feeds.
2) Use Short Clips To Tease Longer Stories
As we noted last week in our post on social ledes, if you have a strong piece of footage, letting it doing the talking on Facebook and Twitter can lead to huge engagement.
It’s an idea for publishers that are dealing with longer videos – what can you pull out to entice Facebook’s scrolling browsers?
This is something that VICE use to good effect in previewing their upcoming releases, stirring interest and engagement before the full video is even available. Their ISIS documentary trailer was posted almost two weeks before Part One of the series, and has been viewed over 400,000 times on YouTube since.
3) Explain the News Through Video
The Wall Street Journal is one of a number of news sites that have seen success with their range of videos called ‘The Short Answer‘. The brief clips are put together using Adobe After Effects, and are one of a number of ways that the site is responding to the needs of their mobile and social readers.
Another example comes from Vox.com, who claim to want to ‘explain the news’. Their explainer videos follow a similar theme to the WSJ’s – succinct, easily-digestible takes on current topics, perfect for mobile users.
4) Use Twitter’s Player Cards
Twitter’s ‘video cards’ feature allows videos to be playing in the timeline, much like the Facebook uploader.
News sites that are using the function include the BBC, The Guardian, The Irish Times, the Washington Post, and more. Many of these sites have their own Twitter accounts for their videos. Some just use gifs to tease the videos.
The brave and lonely men of the Ebola ambulance teams in Liberia: https://t.co/rCqBGGriQI https://t.co/zFaei7XQyZ
— New York Times Video (@nytvideo) October 21, 2014
See here for more details on how to set up Twitter Player Cards for your content.
On that note, Twitter also recently introduced a new feature to allow users to listen to podcasts and other audio streams, without having to navigate away from their timeline.
5) Summing Up with Vine and Instagram Video
Vine and Instagram test the editing skills of even the most experienced video producers.
With their 6 and 15 second respective limits, it’s amazing to see what publishers have been able to come up with in order to effectively engage with both new and existing readers.
Impressively, Mashable even manage 15 second tech reviews on Instagram. Alternatively, use Vine to preview upcoming stories and key story events (this could be part of your social lede). Here’s an eye-catching example from the Guardian:
When it comes to telling telling and selling your stories online, imagination is increasingly the only limit to publishers.
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