How to Maximize the Impact of Mobile Video

Introduce your brand name and message quickly, since people often watch mobile video in short bursts when they’re on the go.² Don’t forget to include captions so that your video can be easily understood whether people view it with sound on or off.

You can make your content more immersive by creating vertical videos, which take up more space on the screen than horizontal videos when people hold their phones upright. Vertical videos have also been shown to perform better than horizontal videos in terms of ad recall, according to a 2016 analysis of data from 10 advertisers.³

Marketers often look at view duration as a KPI. But duration isn’t a good proxy for attention, and measuring duration alone doesn’t account for the fact that mobile video consumption is often fast, frequent and on the go.

Instead, measuring impact based on business goals—like brand and sales goals—should be marketers’ top priority. Increasingly, we’re seeing advertisers use mobile video to drive and measure sales. From 2016 to 2017, there was a 3.8x increase in advertisers using video in direct response campaigns across Facebook, Instagram and the Audience Network.⁴

When marketers want to create a mass marketing campaign, their first impulse is often to advertise on TV during prime time. But now that people are spending less time on traditional TV and more time on mobile, prime time isn't the only way to access a big audience. Our studies show that Facebook can also achieve significant reach, and often at a lower cost than TV.⁵ Facebook can also help marketers reach light TV viewers.