200M+ Instagrammers look at a business profile each day, of which, 2 in 3 visits are from non-followers. Yet, whilst the opportunity on Instagram for businesses continues to thrive for driving brand awareness as well as conversions, the battle to keep peoples attention also intensifies. Various studies have already proved how people’s eyes fixated longer on video ads compared to static - but in order for your video ads to be most effective on mobile, they need to be optimised for the mobile viewing environment, and never been easier to do so!
Here are top 5 tips to help you easily adapt your existing assets for mobile - and our "here's one we made earlier" best-practice example:
Trim your video to match consumption behaviour on mobile People flip through content quickly on mobile, so it’s important for your video ads to match this fast consumption behaviour. Shortening your video ads will not only optimise them for how people consume content on mobile, but will also ensure your video ads are eligible for placements such as in-stream.
Crop your video to fit the mobile screen Since people typically consume content on mobile while holding their phone vertically, it’s important to take advantage of the vertical screen space by creating 9:16 video ads. And formatting your video ads to fit the vertical screen space is now easier than ever with the automatic cropping tool in Ads Manager, in which Facebook's scene detection technology identifies the focal point of a non-vertical video on a frame-by-frame basis and automatically crops the video to the aspect ratio of the your choice.
Create assets that work with sound on and off Since video viewing happens at different parts of the day in various settings, we know people enjoy having the ability to watch with or without sound. That’s why we recommend using subtitle to help deliver your message when people are watching with the sound off. You can also layer text assets on your video to guide viewers through your story arc and communicate your business messages seamlessly in the mobile environment.
Bookend with your brand Since people flip through content quickly on mobile, be sure your brand or business message is prominent at the beginning and/or end of the video, to help drive higher brand awareness and ad recall. Including your brand at the beginning of your video will give it a better chance of being seen and including it at the end will help keep your brand top of mind as people move on to other content.
Turn static images into video ads with slideshow The slideshow tool on Facebook makes it easy to create lightweight video ads from images you already have without any additional production investment, so they’re quick and affordable to create. Slideshow ads are also ideal when you need to reach people on slower connections, like in emerging markets, since slideshow ads load quickly and play well on any connection speed.
