The way we develop and maintain our personal and professional relationships has changed with the introduction of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Social media was a game changer and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. Without a doubt, one of the biggest changes has been in the way people manage their businesses and how audiences interact with and perceive businesses. Social media is busy and buzzing with a 2021 estimate of 3.02 billion monthly active users expected. Businesses that intend to be relevant within their industries must be active on social media. However, that’s only the first step.
The next step that is essential to the success of your business, is the use of video in your marketing campaign. We discussed this in more detail in our previous blog post. Social media platforms are helping to boost business visibility by facilitating recorded and edited content along with live streaming content. This allows for closer communication between a brand and consumers. Although stats do show that there is a slight preference for recorded and edited content than live content at 52% - 48%. Every social platform has its peculiarities. If you want to get the best results from your video content, it's important to research and become familiar with these peculiarities. In this section we will mention overviews of a few of the most powerful among the lot that are available on the internet space.
1. Facebook – Arguably one of the easiest social media platforms to manage and navigate in terms of posting videos, monitoring results, receiving feedback and engaging a large audience, etc. Facebook has an estimated 2.2 billion active users worldwide every month as of the 4th quarter of 2017. Facebook is a leader in virtually every available metric that intertwines the power of social media and videos. These include an 87% in consumer views, 83% in the consumer purchases as a result of the videos viewed and 86% in the consumer engagement metric. There is also a 67% increase with video advertsing investments among marketers. The features in Facebook allow you to deliver video content that reaches beyond your organic audience. Facebook also includes tools that help you measure the engagement on the videos that you post.
Facebook also has a Virtual Reality Service called Facebook Spaces allowing interaction in a virtual environment among users. This multiplies the possibilities for brand interaction that brings you that much closer to your audience provided you have well-curated video content. There are more than 50 million small businesses making use of the power of Facebook to push the frontiers of their business and 4 million of those go for paid advertising on the platform. Facebook continues to make game-changing moves that would likely continue to keep it ahead of the competition for the better part of the virtual social future. One of these moves came with the 2012 acquisition of Instagram for $1billion.
This was a sign, if any, about the impending power of visual media, 6 years on – Instagram is growing in influence from a modest filter-app to the top source for consumers viewing branded videos behind only Facebook. Instagram also comes in third in engagement with branded videos behind Facebook and YouTube. Facebook is also advancing as a video hub as upward of over 4.4 million videos have been uploaded to the platform directly rather than the conventional embedding of links to videos published on video hubs like YouTube and Vimeo.
2. YouTube – The next in line is YouTube which is primarily a video platform. Apart from uploading video content, businesses also use the platform to maintain an online portfolio of all their videos while sharing the links to their videos on other social platforms. In most of the categories where you have Facebook leading above, you have YouTube as a close second. YouTube has 1.3 billion users worldwide and have 9% of businesses in the USA using the platform for their businesses. There is 40% increase in the number of users that are running ads on YouTube every year. As highlighted in our video marketing blog, approximately 20% of people who start watching a video leave after the first 10 seconds and creating an eye-catching intro is of heavy importance. This is where the expertise of our creative team here at Tri-Toy can help to ensure that your video is well curated and produced. There have been over 40 billion views for branded content on YouTube.
3. Twitter – Though Twitter started primarily as a microblogging site, there have been additions and more allowances in the constraints on twitter. Its innovations are certainly helpful and the constraint on the amount of words helps to bring out the creative best in your text. The strength of powerful summaries can also be accompanied by the use of quality video content. This creative best must also accompany your video content as you are constrained to 2 minutes and 20 second length. Customers on Twitter have a strong expectation for response when comments; either complaints or compliments are made and usually they expect these responses within an hour. There is a hashtag hype that floods twitter. However, it is important to note that statistics prove that it does not increase visibility and “hashtag-less” tweets perform better than those with hashtags. Summary – Focus on content quality!
Twitter though has seen a decline in revenue and there’s a lot of pressure exerted on its position by other rising platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. Instagram now has over 800 million users and 72% of them report making a purchase decision after engagement with brands that make use of the platform’s app while twitter sees only 82% of its users watch the videos. Instagram is proving to be an attractive option for businesses with time. There is a likelihood that Instagram breaks into the big 3 mentioned in this article by displacing Twitter in the near future. Everyday more and more people are turning to social media to learn more about the brands that they have interest in. There is a high likelihood that adults between the ages of 18-34 years old would follow your brand on a social media platform if they have an interest in you.
Going beyond first and initial impact; never underestimate the power of recommendations – there is a 71% chance that when you make a positive impact, your brand will see an increase in social media referrals, either by a review, retweet, share or shout out. The use of video helps to bring your business to the forefront, as your content is 40 times more likely to be shared through social media when backed up by visual content. Visual content is powerful. Video content distributed through social media is a more powerful tool coupled with brand authenticity allowing your business will reach new heights.
So, be sure to contact Tri-Toy Productions today about how we can help you take your video marketing to the next level.
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