Adding Auto Playing Videos to Your Social Wall

Social media videos have steadily gained in popularity the past few years as each of the social networks embedded more native video features onto their platform. Vine kicked off the race for video domination with it's 15 second loops, followed by Instagram and their 30 second videos. Both Twitter and Facebook followed suit by highlighting more video features as well as inline and automatic video playback.

And one of the key factors in moving towards video: Social video generates over 1200% more shares than text and images combined ¹. That's right, a whopping 1200%! Clearly adding video to your content strategy and being able to highlight video in any campaign is critical.

Our goal at Spotlyte is to create tools to simplify the digital marketer's job of engaging their audience and expanding their brand.

To that end, we've been working on integrating and handling video content in more natural and dynamic ways in our social walls. What better way to engage and reach fans than show short video clips of them interacting with your brand on your social wall. Or having live video automatically play on your social media wall at an event or product activation.

Inline Videos

Playing videos inline keeps your audience on your page and exploring more of your content. And with inline content, other Spotlyte engagement features such as call to actions can be applied.

Inline videos are shown in a modal pop-up on top of your Social Wall. If a user clicks on a post for more details than this modal opens that shows a larger version of the image and comment, and if it happens to be a video it will play directly in the modal. To enable the feature, simply enable the checkbox at Display Editor > Customize Theme > Post > Use Post Pop Up

Auto Playing Videos

We also wanted to account for some of our social walls intended for social displays. These walls are intended to be viewed on a large screen or display with no user interaction, so posts will automatically scroll, flip, or slide into view.

In some of these cases, the video will automatically play if it's the featured post when it animates into view. To enable auto-playing videos, enable the checkbox at Display Editor > Customize Theme > Pop Up Random Posts When Idle for the Waterfall theme. This will ensure that posts will randomly pop-up when new posts aren't being approved and added to the wall. If a new posts pops into the featured position and it's a video, then it will automatically play.

This has been extremely popular for many activations as the audience is now able to view live video directly on the live social wall.

Here's a short video clip of a live social wall with pop-up animations and autoplaying video:

Those were just a couple of the things we've added for video. We actually have a long roadmap of other video features that we're considering to include in our social walls. If you have any ideas or thoughts on social walls, please drop us a message or leave us a comment on what video features you'd like to see.

As you can see, adding video to your social wall is as simple as clicking a few extra options. Engaging your audience with video is an important part of any content strategy, and Spotlyte makes it even simpler now to include it on your social walls and hubs.