In the early days of movies, the shift from silent movies to “talkies” was transformational. Sound brought a new dimension of verisimilitude and compelling emotional reality to the silver screen. Today, we see a reverse trend towards silent videos on social media. Even as the volume of video content shared online rises to new highs each year, with more than 8 billion video views per day on Facebook, the same again on Snapchat, and social channels such as Pinterest racing to encourage native video sharing, the 85% of all Facebook videos and similarly large percentages of videos posted to other social networks are watched without sound.
Pinterest is implementing a new native video player.
Silent video is the logical result of two competing pressures on social networks.
On the one hand, video content is compelling and sparks engagement, with the average US adult spending 115 minutes per day watching digital video in 2015. So the more videos that a social network can host and encourage its users to watch, the better. Not only that, but autoplaying video ads is great for advertising revenue. If a Twitter user watches an autoplaying video for three seconds, the advertiser gets charged and Twitter makes money. If a Facebook user watches a video for 10 seconds, the same happens.
On the other hand, people hate pages that automatically play sounds. Hate them. No one wants to be checking a social network at work or on the bus only to suddenly hear an unwanted video start playing; it’s embarrassing and annoying.
So there’s pressure to get more videos seen, and pressure for them not to have sound – thus silent videos are common.
The modern social media-optimized silent videos
Creating silent videos for social media calls for a different approach than a TV commercial or other traditional video. Expect that a significant percentage of your viewers will be watching with their sound off, so text overlays are critical to engaging your audience. Generally, this means that content created for other media can’t just be dropped in, even with subtitles added – the subtitles won’t convey the full meaning of the video. The early silent commercials had to use simple and clear visuals and narratives so viewers could clearly understand the message, and social videos must do the same.
When text is included, it should be visually dynamic and should accompany and reinforce the voiceover or dialogue (for those who turn sound on). It should also fit smoothly into the overall visual look; too much text combined with too much other visual complexity will confuse viewers.
Political campaigns on all sides of the ideological spectrum have been doing a great job at this. Here’s one example of a Twitter-friendly video that is strong with the sound off and stronger with it on (setting aside the particular policies and positions advocated; image links to the video itself on Twitter):
DigiDay has some useful additional recommendations particularly for Facebook, including starting with a compelling image before leading into a text-heavy video. They do mention that too much similar-looking video makes news feeds stale – so as always, consider your unique angle in your videos.