Photo credit: Dara Bu
Brands that ignore social media videos risk missing a prime marketing opportunity to reach millions of consumers.
Social media videos offer brands a high-powered marketing tool. They tend to attract more viewers, lead to more sharing among viewers, and deliver better ROI. They are accessible to anyone with a smartphone, are easy and affordable to produce, and are ideal for building trust with customers.
One in three millennials watched mostly online video and not broadcast TV at all last year, according to a survey by The New York Times. A quarter of online video viewers watched less TV than they did the previous year. The growing popularity of short online videos can be seen in the proliferation of new social media outlets stressing video and Facebook’s recent video enhancements. Most every consumer has at some time been seduced into watching an online video segment. A high portion of consumers prefer online video communications to text.
YouTube Still Champ, But Not the Only Choice
YouTube was the original social video channel and remains important for longer “feature length” home-produced and marketing videos. But, now, other networks like Vine and Instagram dominate short video clips that are ideal for people who typically watch videos on their smartphones while on the go. Facebook has rapidly gained market share since its introduction of videos in news feeds. Pinterest and Google+ also display both homemade and commercial videos on their platforms.
Topics for Social Media Videos
Here are several ways brands can market with social videos.
Demonstrations. Show how to do something. That could be how to use your product or how to solve a problem (using your product). For example, Video Meals posted video snapshots on Instagram with step-by-step instructions for creating a meal. Meeting short time limits can be challenging. A solution is to speed up videos. Lowe’s often utilizes that technique, showing blurring-fast home improvement projects on Vine.
Events. Holidays and other events offer opportunities for short videos. Other websites looking for holiday-related content are likely to share the video clips.
New products. You can satisfy customers’ natural curiosity and with a glimpse of a new product or a preview of a product in the works.
Behind-the-scenes views. Inside views of your company facilities and people help make customers feel special and part of the family.
Tips for Creating Social Media Videos
Focus on the social platform. The social networks draw different demographics, display videos differently and have varied time limits: six seconds for Vine, 15-seconds on Instagram, and two to three minutes on the news feed for Facebook and on Google+. Creating and editing videos with a particular network in mind rather than uploading the same video across multiple networks, is a best practice for proper video marketing. Researching the audience upfront can guide development of video content and format.
Seek your audience. Viral videos do not indicate business success, and clips gaining relatively few views are successful if those viewers are the right audience. Promoting sharing can help but gaining shares to the right audience is ideal.
Make it shareable. Think about why people will share the video before production starts. Look at what videos your followers are already sharing for examples and inspiration.
Use storytelling techniques. Including a hero, antagonist, conflict and one of the archetypical story plots tends to attract and retain greater interest.
Get emotional. People are more likely to share emotional content, especially in videos involving positive emotions, according to psychological studies. For its holiday campaign, WestJet asked people preparing to board their planes what gifts they wanted for the holidays, and then had the gifts waiting for them when they landed. The heartwarming video of the gift presentations was viewed over 36 million times.
Use good tools. Fitness website MelisaMade features split-screen posts that show fitness fanatic Melisa McAllister exercising on one side of the screen and her describing it on the other. Such split-screen videos are relatively easy to produce with tools like PicPlayPost. Another tool, the Videohance app, allows video editing on an iPhone by adding effects like borders, light leaks, text, and music.
Bottom Line: Social video represents a major new marketing opportunity. Greater marketing impact can be achieved by developing multiple versions of each marketing video to meet the technical specifications of each social video platform and the preferences of their distinctive audiences. Applying proven video techniques and first-rate production values makes marketing success more likely.
Other Articles
A Guide to Social Video, and Where it Fits in Your Marketing Plan
Hootsuite
6 Ways to Use Short Video for Social Marketing
Social Media Examiner
11 Reasons Why Your Brand Should be Using Social Video
Econsultancy
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
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