The major social media platforms are pushing video content to gain market share of users. The social media giants, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, are customizing their algorithms for better video visibility in an attempt to secure larger viewership, and by extension ad money, for future video content. Similarly these platforms are also adding video processing features to encourage content creators to increase their already dizzying video production paces.
A recent Cisco whitepaper anticipates that 85% of search traffic in the U.S. will come from videos by 2019. Social media is growing more reliant on video content, and the traffic it drives, every day. With the rise in video content and viewership on the horizon, social media platforms and marketers will undoubtedly invest in online video content in the coming years. According to figures from eMarketer, online video advertising spending is expected to grow 156% from 2018 to 2020.
Social media videos have already reached staggering viewership and market share. More than 5 billion videos are watched each day on YouTube, around 500 million people watch Facebook videos every day, 82% of Twitter’s audience watches video content on the platform, and Snapchat generates 10 billion video views every single day (Inc.com). According to Social Media Today, 65% of people who watch a video for the first 3 seconds will watch for at least 10 seconds, and 45% of them will watch for 30 seconds or more.
Marketing Impact
The dynamic growth of online video content dramatically impacts the marketing process because so many users seek out video for entertainment and research. For example, Social Media Today reports that 4 in 5 millennials consider video content for making purchasing decisions. Marketers will have to adapt their marketing strategies for viewership, audience expectations, distribution strategies, and analytics and brand monitoring to account for this reliance on video content and forecasted growth online.
Viewership
As online video becomes one of the primary communications method for social media, viewership trends will change. Although the estimated number of consistent online video viewers is expected to grow, the amount of video content is also expected to grow substantially. This growth means that the video landscape will continue to become more competitive and overwhelming. Capturing audiences’ attentions in the sea of media content will become all the more challenging.
Audience Expectations
As video content becomes even more common place, audience expectations for quantity and quality of content will increase. This means that frequent, consistent posting filled with high-quality content will be necessary for businesses to maintain relevance online. This demand for frequent, high-quality content may soon be mitigated by AI-generated video. Using the same foundation principles as video analytics to create original video content, AI-generated video is already becoming a reality, and is being improved every day.
Distribution Strategies
One of the most tangible changes to the marketer’s video social media strategy will be in how content is distributed. Many marketers still post video content exclusively on YouTube, and cross promote this material by pasting a link into posts on the rest of their social media platforms. Currently, many social media platform’s algorithms already rank video content uploaded to the platform much higher in newsfeeds than content linked from other sites. As these ranking algorithms become more prolific, it will become critical to viewership for marketers to post videos individually on all of their social media accounts.
Video Analytics and Brand Monitoring
With more and more video content being posted online every day, marketers must consider how to leverage this information for their brands. Video analytics, such as facial recognition and object identification, can be valuable to businesses in a few ways.
Video analytics have been used for safety and security for some time. Video analytics tools can look for a variety of behaviors, objects, and vehicles, allowing businesses to help prevent and solve crimes such as kidnapping and robbery that take place in or around their facilities.
Video analytics also have value beyond this usage, however. Video analytics can be used to identify positive reactions to a new product, calculate how many times your logo appears in a video, and aid in crowd control for events or densely packed areas like theme parks.
Video analytics tools can be used to analyze publicly released online video as well as content captured by your company, which allows brands to compare, contrast, and combine information from eyewitnesses and internal sources. One specific use for video analytics across a variety of sources would include crisis PR. Evaluating where your brand or represented individual appears in videos surrounding a controversy can allow you to fully understand the scope of the event, as well as view it from different angles and prospective. These usages can provide outstanding, actionable insights into thousands of hours of content that would be expensive and time prohibitive to analyze manually.
[Check out our past blog: Big Data Analytics: Why Are They So Important?]
Video as a Critical Resource
Video production can be time consuming and labor intensive for businesses, but it is a critical component to reaching modern consumers. According to Social Media Today, 60% of YouTube subscribers trust online personalities and fellow social media users’ product recommendation more than their favorite Hollywood celebrity. Video is already the most shared content type, generating “1200% more shares than text and images combined on social platforms.” (Weidert Group) As video becomes more central to the communications landscape, marketers will have to adjust to changing video expectations. Although there is a struggle to stay current in this tumultuous media landscape, there is also great reward.
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