All of the awesome written content you have is marketing gold. It’s great for SEO, it’s great for your branding, and it’s great for lead gen. 

But when it comes to social media… How do you share those blog articles, PDFs, online reviews, and books?

It’s easy to simply copy and paste a blog article’s URL in your Facebook news feed and call it a day. 

But here’s the deal: 

When it comes to education and the way people learn, viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text. 

So this bides the question, how do you turn that written content into video for social? This just so happens to be the #1 way to share your text-heavy content on social media: as text-motion video. 

Video Vs. Written Content/Images 

Since 95% of people retain a message when watched through video, you want to take value-packed sections of your written content and repurpose it into text-motion video. 

People aren’t just retaining the information you give with this medium. They’re investing. 64% of people say that watching a video increases their chances of buying something. 

So this is huge when it comes to the way your market and promote your content online. 

Text-Motion Videos

Let’s break down the structure of a text-motion video. Here’s an example for reference: 

Text-motion videos allow you to take any written content and design/organize it in a way that’s captivating in people’s feeds. 

There are a few elements we always like to include in ours: 

• Awesome branding (you’re able to set specific colors and fonts in your text-motion video so followers learn your style)
• Large, engaging headlines. That’s the part that says “One Trick That Can Beat The 5 Hour Facebook Lifespan.” You want it to stand out as people scroll so that they understand what it’s about before watching the full thing
• A CTA (call to action) on the actual video itself – that’s the part that says “Visit our website: Repurposehouse.com”
• A CTA at the end of the video – that’s what we show the last 2 seconds

Proven Results with Video for Your Social Media

The reason text-motion performs so well is because it’s not only engaging video, but it’s very clear to understand. 

For example, 85% of videos are watched without the sound on. Text-motion is an awesome solution to this! These videos are basically made of really large, moving captions that people read and watch. There’s zero chance of people scrolling with the sound off and not understanding what your video is about.

On top of that, video is simply taking over. You can create images for your written content to share and post the links to blog articles or places to buy your book, but video dominates. 

Just on Instagram alone, time spent watching videos is up by a full 80%, year over year. So it’s time to adjust. 

Then you’ll also notice that the text-motion example from above is square in size. There’s an optimized reason for that. 

Buffer did a study and found that square videos get 30-35% more views and 80-100% more engagement than landscape sized content on social media. It takes up way more real estate on someone’s phone than landscape size does. So this is an awesome strategy to implement for instant results when creating your videos. 

So… How do You Create Text-Motion Videos? 

You’re lookin’ at it (well, you’re on their site)!

We personally use Wave.video to create all of our (and our clients’) text-motion videos. 

Here’s our step-by-step tutorial on how to repurpose your text-heavy content into video using this platform: 

1. Login to Wave.video (yes, you can even create a free account!)
2. Click “Create Project” to get started 
3. If this is your first-ever video in this platform, you’ll want to start from scratch where you can create your own branding. 
4. Your first step in the creation process is to choose a background that’ll correlate with the text. This part is a ton of fun because you can choose stock videos, images, upload your own b-roll, etc. 
5. Once you’ve selected an image/ video clip as the background, you then get to play around with the text motion. The first thing you want to do is set your brand. To the right of the editing platform you’ll be able to choose the colors, font, shadow, etc. of your text:
6. Once your brand is set, start editing what you want the text to say: 
7. Customize the way you want your text to animate when the video plays, and how long you want it to appear on the screen. It’s important to remember that you don’t want text to disappear too quickly. Give people enough time to read it: 
8. Test it out – hit the bit blue play button at the bottom left to see how your first clip looks: 
9. Once you’re happy with that first part, click “ADD TEXT” to continue detailing your text-motion video and repeat these steps! 

Text-motion is no longer a “want to” but a “need to” when it comes to sharing your blogs, books, and PDFs in a proven and optimized way on social media.

About the author: Shaina Weisinger is the Founder and CEO of Repurpose House, which turns long-form content into optimized videos and images for high engagement social media strategies. Shaina has a background in video production for digital marketing and is on a mission to show content creators the untapped potential and repurposing power of the content that they already have.

She has taught about content in many publications including DigitalMarketer, Inc., and Startup Nation, and continuously offers valuable takeaways by interviewing industry experts from world-recognized brands such as GoDaddy, HubSpot, MarketingProfs, and more through her video podcast, The Content Coalition.