35% searches are now on smartphones, which means your business videos are being viewed on phones.

This is a big shift from just a couple of years ago, where phone video viewing was much less.

Now there’s a danger of being out of date, left in the cold.

Which asks the question: Are your videos suitable for phone viewing?

Here are 9 tips to help your gauge the situation, and plan ahead for the future, safe in the knowledge you won’t lose valuable viewings unnecessarily.

9 tips to make your videos work on a phone

Your video production company should know all the following, but perhaps they don’t.

Fortunately, at least you will.

Here are the 9 ways:

1 – Don’t show detail unless it’s shown up close. Aim to film bigger screen-filling images.

2 – Keep captions short and big, and animate them more obviously or conservatively. Pirouetting text may look great on big screen, but bewildering on small screen.

3 – Expect your video to be played with sound off sometimes, so let the pictures take more responsibility for telling the story.

4 – Don’t have more than 2 people in shot unless they’re merely “a crowd” or backdrop, otherwise face details will start to get lost.

5 – Make sure the contrast isn’t too high, even though large screen viewing may look okay, otherwise you’ll get “white-out”, especially when viewed in daylight.

6 – Film at full letterbox size 16:9 True 1920 HD to maximise detail levels, and present finer image clarity.

7 – Don’t expect a phone video to be viewed for more than 2.8 minutes (ref Wistia), so keep it short as possible. Runtimes of 1-2 minutes should be fine – or make 2 short videos in place of a single long one.

8 – Fiddly infographic explainer videos don’t work well on phones – poor visibility. Keep animated graphics big and chunky.

9 – Ensure the overall sound mix works on a phone speaker, and not just on big speakers – otherwise your video will sound squeaky.

If you adopt the above 9 tips, your videos will be less abandoned on phone

– positioning you to maximise for the 35% of searches that are now phone-driven.