If you truly want to understand how well your storytelling on social media is working, there is an outstanding tool for this: Audience Retention.
(You can find retention graphs on many social platforms, but in this e-book we will be focusing on Facebook Audience Retention, since it’s one of the easiest to use and understand.)
What is audience retention?
Audience retention (sometimes referred to as “viewer retention”) measures the proportion of viewers of a video who watches the video through to the end. At Storykit we believe that retention is the single most important metric for every video producer who wants to tell stories in social. There are, of course, loads of metrics that can be important for you to know if your work is having any effect. But retention is is the only metric that will tell you anything about the actual quality of your video. It’s also a truth-teller regarding what your viewers genuinely think about your video. So if you haven’t paid any attention to your retention graphs, it’s about time.
Understanding the retention graph
To understand how to interpret retention, we have to examine the full retention graph. What we should do is to divide the graph into three separate parts with fundamentally different “meaning”. A drop in retention at the start or towards the end of a video simply does not mean the same thing as a drop in retention right in the middle.
A typical retention curve from the Facebook newsfeed looks something like this:
In this fictional video 5% of the initial audience stays until the video is finished. Not great, right? But is it really so terrible? And more interesting yet — what could have been done to improve it? To determine, we have to break this retention curve down further.
1. The targeting drop
Independent on how great your f ilm is, a lot of people will drop out during the first 10 % of playtime because of targeting — the video is simply not relevant for them. This is primarily due to the nature of distribution which — in the case of the Facebook newsfeed — relies on ”auto-play”. The viewer has not chosen to see this film — it has simply appeared in their feed.
There are ways of reducing the targeting drop, but we don’t think you should worry about this too much. There is natural selection of audience in this drop that can be productive for the rest of your f ilm. One could even argue that if there is no targeting drop, the video has been underdistributed, because everyone it reaches want to actually watch it.
2. The outro drop
Let’s be honest: People do not stay to watch your great-looking outro. The story is finished, so they move on. If you have your most important information in the outro, you should probably rethink your script. If not — you should not worry about this drop too much. But this is also why you shouldn’t focus on how many viewers you still have left at 95% of the video.
You will be losing viewers in the beginning and the end of your video. Don’t worry too much about it.
3. The zone of productivity
Between the “Targeting drop” and “The Outro drop” is “The Zone of Productivity”. This is the part of the video that you should really evaluate. These are viewers that have chosen to watch your film, who have decided to consume it, and who have not yet watched it to its actual finish (before the “Outro drop”).
This part of the curve, obviously, should be as flat as possible. In this hypothetical film, we loose 1/3 of the viewers in the area of productivity. Maybe not great, but way better than 95%. But most importantly: we now have a real foundation for analyzing our video. It is obvious that we are loosing viewers at two specific points in the video:
In this example we have identified two parts of our video and our script that we need to examine closer to create a perfect video. Luckily, in Facebook it is extremely easy to scroll the retention graph and get a clear idea of where in your video the audience is dropping off.
Use these insights to create even better video, the next time!
