How much can video and animation impact engagement on your LinkedIn posts?

There is no doubt you secretly hope that every post you create is well received, gets a good level of likes and gains maximum traction. It’s in our nature to want to do well so why would this change when it comes to a social post.

Today, more than ever the use of social media is paramount, but with that comes a mass of content being thrown at us daily. Your content must stand out amongst the noise and video or animation is proving to be more and more effective.

“By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic — 15 times higher than it was in 2017.” Cisco

Of course, content is key, people want to read interesting articles however before people read your article they need to be enticed to it and that is where the effectiveness of your post comes in.

Now, we are not saying a powerful image will not boost your article to the top of everyone’s feed but research shows that video/animation is becoming more and more popular with a higher chance of captivating your audience – an animation/video will also keep a user on your post and page for longer.

“Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text.” Invisia

‘I can’t create a video for every post!’ – current readers thoughts

You don’t need to create a feature film every time you post, it can be as simple as adding motion to a graphic you created just help you stand out from the crowd. IBM is a brilliant reference for this, they create beautiful graphics with animation added to catch your eye.

Each video should tell a story and have a purpose so judge the length by that motto but just have in mind there are hundreds of posts around, make your point but make it quick, between 3 and 30 seconds can be enough. If you have to use a longer video this still can be effective just go in with the expectations that people may not watch until the end.

“The average length of video uploaded to our Beta programme was 45 seconds – but that average masked some big variations in length. I saw videos of up to 5 minutes generating significant levels of engagement, and videos that were 10 seconds long doing the same.

It goes without saying that completion rates tend to be higher for shorter videos – but that doesn’t mean that longer videos are never watched in full, or that they aren’t watched for long enough to have a meaningful impact.” LinkedIn Sales and Marketing Blog

Below is an example of how we have added motion to our case study posts to increase the chances of getting noticed.

A few tips when creating video content on LinkedIn:

“57% of all engagement on LinkedIn is via mobile”

Make your video mobile-friendly, the days of desktop being priority are over! When we say a mobile-friendly video we mean a video that can be orientated to fit on a small screen, generally 16:9 works best.

From a brand marketing perspective, animated and video content are also great posts to boost as sponsored posts – as interactions can be captured, analysed and retargeted.

“(80%) of video views on LinkedIn take place with the sound off”

People fly through LinkedIn and they may not have the chance/want to click into your video to watch it or they may be on the tube and not be able to listen to it! So make sure your video is designed to be silent, research has found that 70% of silent content is watched until the end. If you do decide to go with a silent video, add subtitles where needed.