David Coleman

Over the past few months, Facebook has gradually introduced members and businesses to its new auto-play video ad unit. Officially announced in March, these premium video ads are designed to play automatically as members scroll through News Feed for 15 seconds without sound.

That same month, more advertisers were given access to the ad unit. As the social network inches closer to a wider rollout, advertisers are understandably eager to take advantage. Although premium video ads are still limited, now is the perfect time to begin brainstorming and prepping for Facebook’s review process.

Here are some best practices to consider when crafting your auto-play video ad campaigns. And don’t forget to take a look at the past year’s top-performing branded videos and samples of non-invasive video ads before you start filming.

Don’t Recycle Content

While there’s definitely a time and place for cross-posting your content, we don’t recommend repurposing videos that people have already seen elsewhere. Keep in mind that anyone who doesn’t want to see your ad can just scroll past it in News Feed. Because of that, you’ll want to ensure that the video you paid to promote is something that people can’t find anywhere else — at least initially.

By this, we mean Facebook auto-play video ads should be reserved for sharing exclusive content. Once the ad has run its course, you can feel free to republish it on other platforms. But as long as it’s running on Facebook, make sure that that’s the only place people can find something like it. For example, if you’re promoting a trailer for a movie like Lionsgate did for “Divergent,” then it should either be the first trailer or one with exclusive scenes from the movie that can’t be found in other existing trailers.

Do Keep Videos Short

<img title="facebook-video-ads-short" alt="facebook-video-ads-short" …read more

Brad Schenck is the digital director for the Rainforest Action Network, and he previously spearheaded digital strategy at Organizing for Action, the Obama 2012 campaign, and Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration Committee. He’s been a leading figure when it comes to digital campaigns for NGOs, political campaigns, and nonprofits, and his teams have used Sprout Social to accomplish their objectives.

We spoke with him about how different kinds of not-for-profit and activism organizations have different sorts of needs, what makes for a smooth-running organization, and how Sprout Social helped make his job easier.

Rallying Around a Date

When he transitioned from a campaign and an inauguration — both big events with set end dates — to ongoing advocacy in Organizing for Action, the transition was more challenging than some might think.

“In the campaign world, your dates and deadlines are pretty prescribed to you by the calendar,” he says. “There are voter registration deadlines, there are end of quarter deadlines, there’s election day. There’s a termination point to your actual organization’s existence.”

Having that event to rally around remained important even after the campaign. “You have to set that date. There will be a few dates on the calendar that make sense, but mostly you have to be forward-thinking enough to create dates. You have to create moments… It’s really important that everyone in the organization believe in the date as the most important thing the organization is doing that day. The supporters will never feel it unless everyone’s really together and unified.”

Managing Large Networks With Sprout Social

When he worked on the Obama campaign and later Organizing for Action, he said the scale of the organizations was vast, and that presented some unique problems. “One of the very unknown things about the campaign was that we had a pretty robust digital presence for all 50 states, …read more

One band’s story

“We were a band of white boys from Ohio that hitch-hiked our way to New York to try and make it big. Needless to say, by the time we arrived we were completely broke. We had nothing but the gear we hadn’t pawned yet and the clothes on our back. So when it came to finding a place to stay we were limited by the budget of what we were able to scrape together by busking in front of Yankee Stadium and ‘donating’ plasma.

Our first stroke of luck came in the form of a cab driver that was inspired by our tenacity and offered us the spare room in his townhouse in Queens. So we found ourselves the proverbial ‘fish out of water’ in a neighborhood that was racially, culturally, and financially worlds away from anything we had ever known.

Honestly, we were scared and intimidated. We really weren’t sure we were in a position to find any success in such unfamiliar territory. What we discovered was that music is a bond that builds bridges across unknown expanses. Beyond the differences separating us from the community that had taken us in, we realized that we were all blue-collared Americans looking to blow off steam after a hard day’s work.

We quickly established a reputation as the neighborhood good-time band by playing house parties and getting paid with fried chicken and cheap liquor. And from there it snowballed into steady gigs at the hottest clubs in the city and a national touring circuit that took us places we never imagined. We became more than just a band of musicians. We became cross-cultural ambassadors for sonic manipulation!”

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It’s true that there are bands out there whose music is so compelling and instantly connects with such a mass audience that the story doesn’t …read more

The incredible change we’re all experiencing these days is highly fractal. Similar patterns are emerging at many levels, and we can learn a lot by zooming in and zooming out. For instance, we can talk about how marketing technology is changing — which it is, at a phenomenal pace. But we can…

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