Employer Branding Back to Front

You’ve created your beautiful employer brand video. Sat through the shoot, slaved over the edit, chosen the music that has the normally stoic CEO in tears. It’s taken pride of place on your careers site…

All that’s left to do is pop it up on Facebook and watch the ‘A’ Candidates roll in, right?

Wrong. Most employer brand videos follow the structure and form of a TV ad:

• They’re shot in 16:9 (the standard landscape format of ‘traditional’ TV).
• They require sound – either music or a voice-over or an interview to tell the story.
• They are over 30 seconds long and often have the brand name at the very end.

Up until recently that’s how we created our videos for Facebook too. Until we met with their Lead Creative Strategist.

He explained to us how the behaviours on their platform are utterly different to how we view videos on traditional media or even on other platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn or YouTube.

Like it or not, we now live in a world of skimming and we’re vying for seconds of attention from candidates. Our role on their platform now is to keep people as long as possible before the dreaded index finger appears and moves on from our content. And we need to remember that how people engage with promoted videos is very different than how the engage with friends or entertainment-based videos.

Whenever our clients are placing video on Facebook now we are implementing these learnings and can see the stark difference in our A/B testing of regular employer brand videos and optimised employer brand videos.

So, what are the top tips to help get your videos working to their maximum?

The best format for Facebook is a perfect square. While your piece will most likely be shot in 16:9 landscape make sure it’s composed so it can be cropped for a square format.

80% of people viewing Facebook videos expect them to be played without sound. This will drive creatives insane but you have to figure out how you can get your message across with zero sound. You can use titles, subtitles or other visual tricks. It’s challenging but it will drive longer viewing.

If your video doesn’t reveal your brand name or big idea until the very end, there’s a major chance your candidate will have moved on and will never take in your message. Instead, your brand name and your big idea needs to be up in lights in the first 3 seconds. According to Facebook, ads that are designed this way reach 3 times more people.

It’s a depressing stat, but 75% of the message value on Facebook is delivered in the first 10 seconds. So, really anything that is going on past that point is probably a waste of time and money.

In essence, the major shift in thinking is that videos that will run on Facebook need to be seen as trailers to your main video or to other content on your social channels or website. So, it’s more than a simple reformat to suit the channel, it’s a total rethink of how much of the content is delivered – and how.