After slaving away on a great piece of new video marketing content, you upload and boost it on Facebook, then watch the views climb –  while the likes and comment trickle in slowly. Sometimes you’ll meet with colleagues and friends who’ll tell you they loved your video, yet they didn’t like, comment or share it. We’ve all been there, right?

You’re not alone. Unfortunately, while some content is ‘like bait’, other content will always struggle to attract the positive social signal we need for increased distribution. Often it’s the more instructional and educational material that people forget to like.

Facebook now offers you an amazingly powerful way to reach out to these people, video retargeting. Now you can re-market to all those people who are passively viewing your videos while taking no action. The best part for startup founders/marketers is that this strategy is incredibly cost-effective as people willing to invest their time to consume your content are self-identifying and creating an affinity with your brand.

I’m going to make a few assumptions here. Firstly that you promote your videos on Facebook, and secondly that you’ve used Facebook ad manager.

You can navigate directly to the ‘Audience’ section in ad manager here https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager/audiences/manage/

Next, you want to click on the blue button labelled ‘Create Audience.’

From the options listed you want to select ‘custom audience’.

On the next screen, you’ll want to select the ‘Engagement’ option

Finally, on the next screen you can select ‘Video’.

This feature might be buried deep in the Facebook ecosystem but you’re now using one of the best marketing tools that turn ‘window shoppers’ into real shoppers.

On the next screen, you can select the video you’d like to target viewers of as well as the time they have viewed the video for.

What you select here really depends on the length of the video you uploaded and also how perfect you want your audience to be.

If you uploaded a three-minute instructional video then anyone who watched more than 50 percent is probably engaged.

You could limit this to people who have watched more (say 95 percent of your video), but in my experience, this will produce a target group that is too small.

If your video is shorter, say 15-30 seconds then you will want to push the targeting closer to the 95 percent side as it requires much less commitment to your content to watch 8-15 seconds before skipping on.

After you name your audience, Facebook will take a couple of hours to generate this new audience group for you.

Once ready you can retarget any future posts or ads to this audience.

The best part is that once you’ve generated this audience facebook will automatically keep the audience updated.

What you’ve achieved here is a classic marketing funnel.
Your carefully crafted video content is now gaining the attention of potential customers, and as people watch more than 50 percent of your video, you can retarget them with slightly more aggressive posts with a stronger call to action.

There is a vast variety of ways to retarget on the web. However, most of these options require the target users to perform some kind of positive action, typically a click.

Facebook video remarketing empowers you to retarget users who self-identify with your content not through their clicks but through their time, which I would argue is far more valuable than the token like.

If you have any questions or thoughts on the above please do reach out, I’m always happy to help.

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