RAY MEESE

I’ve been digging into our Facebook numbers at work, only to discover we’re not far off from the national trend — our viewers only enable the audio 14% of the time when watching a video we’ve shared via Facebook. Truth be told, audio is only enabled 3% of the time, but I isolated the video views that exceeded 10 seconds and pulled that data, since I only really care about viewers who are at least somewhat engaged.

So how do you get them to listen? You don’t. Instead, you customize the content for that platform.

I’ve been training our Newsroom on Wochit, a video-editing tool that allows users to easily create readable videos. I asked everyone to come with a few video clips and a few photos. Given I asked that of them, I didn’t feel I could come empty handed.

So during a Saturday outing to a waterfall in Malibu, I shot the following video. The background music is nice, so you might want to listen, but even if you don’t you’ll learn just as much.

Watching the video’s performance on Facebook has been interesting. The audio was only enabled by 4% of the viewers. That said, it has received 54,000 views in less than 24 hours, along with 921 comments, 2,779 reactions, 1,554 shares and it has reached 146,000 Facebook users.