Why Mobile Video Optimization is a Must & How to Do It

According to a recent study we conducted here at Animoto, 55% of consumers watch at least one video on mobile per week and 48 percent of millennials only watch video on their mobile devices. New research from Adobe revealed that 62 percent of mobile users use YouTube for discovery and 42 percent find video through their social networking feeds.

These days, consumers are watching more video on mobile devices than ever before and, as a result, it’s becoming more and more important for businesses to optimize their marketing videos for the small screen. Are your videos optimized for mobile? Here’s a quick checklist of four things to keep in mind.

Keep screen size in mind

When creating video content, keep screen size in mind. If someone is watching your video on a small screen, will they be able to see all the tiny details? Will they be able to read the text? Make sure that all of the important parts of your video are large enough that viewers will be able to get the full experience on a mobile device.

Responsive design can also help with this. Have you ever visited a website on your mobile device only to find that the text is too small, items are cut off, and it’s extremely hard to navigate? That’s probably because the site does not have responsive design. Responsive design optimizes your website for whatever platform or device the visitor is using. If your website doesn’t have responsive design, many visitors won’t stick around long enough to view the videos on your site, let alone explore any of your content.

Keep it short and sweet

While Adobe reports that 36 percent of viewers are now watching long form content (more than 5 minutes) on mobile, mobile video consumption is still more of an on-the-go thing than watching video on the web. You should plan your video strategy around this fact and keep video intended to be watched on mobile devices to a minimum length; there’s a reason why 6-second Vine videos and 15-second Instagram videos do so well.

To find out more about the optimal length for different types of videos, check out our blog post featuring the results of our survey surrounding video length.

Include a call to action in your video

Call-to-action buttons and annotations are great additions to videos on the web, but on mobile devices, buttons and annotations within video players themselves often don’t work. That’s why it’s important to include a call to action in the video itself — whether it’s a verbal call to action or text indicating the next step the viewer should take. Learn more in our blog post on 3 ways to include a call to action in your video.

Make sure videos are encoded to play on mobile

You’ll also want to make sure the videos on your website actually play on mobile devices. The Animoto video player, along with other popular video hosting sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, and others, will play on mobile. If you’re hosting your own videos, chances are they may stream slowly, or not at all, depending on the file type.

Testing to make sure your videos are optimized for mobile is easy: simply view your website and videos on your own mobile device and see how they look. If the text is too hard to read, or you run into any other issues, change up your strategy going forward to make sure all of your future videos look great for viewers, no matter what type of device they’re viewing on.

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