Social Media Video is here to Stay

It is clear that social media has grown rapidly over the last decade and more recently there has been a significant growth in social media video. YouTube is the leading social media video platform but 2014 saw Facebook step up and compete along with others such as Twitter, Instagram and Snap.

Social media videos are typically shared across a single platform but the following two statistics demonstrate the increasingly highly sharable nature of social media video across different platforms.

“700 YouTube video links are shared on Twitter every minute” [source – YouTube.com]

“500 years of YouTube videos are watched on Facebook every day”. [Source – YouTube.com]

There are many diverse reasons why someone will elect to hit share, rather simply like or comment. For example, they might want to be the first to share and be seen as having their ‘finger on the pulse’, or perhaps in some way look hip and gain kudos by association, or maybe sharing is coming from an altruistic perspective.

Almost half of video shares occur in the first three days so it is critical to promote newly published videos as much as possible in those all-important early days. As Seth Godin say’s, you need to get the ‘sneezers’ (early adopters) actively campaigning on you behalf to get the ball rolling.

When planning your content it is extremely useful to look at audience profiling and to determine what elements to include that are most likely to result in the video being shared. What are your audience’s preferences – do they like funny, cute, funky, inspiring etc.? Much also depends on whom your audience is sharing the video with. Who are their friends and who is in their network? What interests and passions do they share? Can you somehow tap into the Zeitgeist?

One element that popular videos have in common is that they hit emotions very hard. It is not enough for a funny video to make you smile – you need to be laughing loudly before you even think about sharing it.

A useful exercise is to think about the videos that you personally share on social media and ask yourself why you did that. This will help you gain insight into your own experiences and that knowledge can help you identify triggers in others.

Social Media connects your company with your customers and video takes this to another level. Considering Facebook users watch an average of 1 billion videos per day (August 2014), can you afford not to use social video?

You may also be interested in an article titled, “The key to creating popular shareable social media videos” which can be found on our blog. The article was originally published in the Inside Small Business Magazine.

Here are examples of content that have been either created specifically as, or repurposed as, social media video.