The Year (So Far) in Social Video: Trends and Tips
This week Sparksight presents a special guest post from TrustRadius, an Austin based B2B software review company, to share their viewpoint on digital marketing and social media trends. Check out Christian Golden’s observations so far in 2018 and where we’re headed in the world of social video.
Social video is becoming a more effective vehicle for delivering your message to the audience you want. It continues to blast off in 2018, with social media outlets like Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram, as well as networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, all developing fresh ways of integrating video into the user experience of their sites. Successful businesses have responded by finding ways to harness the potential of video marketing to promote online engagement with their brand. After all, watching video accounts for one-third of time spent online. But the spread of social video content has led to other changes that create special challenges – and opportunities – for companies. Three developments in particular present new openings to companies that want to increase the effective role of video in their social media strategy.
Trend #1: Live Video Reigns
Research shows that video content outshines images and text combined, earning 12 times as many shares on social channels. This comes as no surprise when you consider that social media users retain 95% of a message they see on video, but only 10% of one they read. Short captioned videos that play automatically and convey a message at a glance as users scroll past are especially popular and effective. They remove the need for users to hit ‘play’ and eliminate the chance that they will be whisked away to another site. Here Facebook is exemplary: its recently updated algorithm (more on that below) favors native video, making content uploaded directly more available to followers than media sourced from external sites like YouTube.
Trend #2: The Triumph of the Personal over the Public
Facebook is leading the charge in other related areas with a recent redesign. A change to its algorithms announced earlier this year prioritizes content from family and friends over content from brands and businesses, with the stated aim of helping “people stay connected” by promoting “the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.” This decision was prompted in part by controversy and public criticism over the way in which Facebook’s previous management of site content helped spread “fake news” and inflammatory material, which has been shown to have had controversial results for the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, to take the most high-profile example.
One important take-away from all this is that brand media must compete more than ever with users’ families and friends for social media bandwidth.
Trend #3: Smaller, Shorter, Temporary…er
Live video and personalized content marketing are not the only big trends gaining momentum in 2018. The demise of the desktop is driving on-demand, bite-sized content in the spirit of Snapchat and Instagram stories.Despite its narrower reach, the temporary format improves digital media engagement, 69% of which is happening on mobile devices. Consequently, mobile optimization is fast becoming key to effectively curated content, especially in the area of social video.
Rolling with These Changes
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits that the recent changes to the site’s algorithm could lead to a short-term reduction in engagement metrics. Publishers and businesses, therefore, need to rethink their digital marketing strategies to compensate for their lower reach in social media news feeds. Another thing to look out for is the rising cost of social media advertisement. Expect increasing competition over target audiences among social media-based companies. This trend has been underway for a while, with a 74% increase in ad spending on Facebook in 2017 alone. And it is expected to continue to ramp up.
Something to keep in mind is that, despite the overhaul, Facebook users remain able to prioritize content from favored pages with the “See First” feature. And Facebook’s updated algorithm is designed to increase the news feed visibility of public content that spurs conversation. Facebook’s Creator App is another important tool enabling brands and individual creators to adapt to the expansion of live video and temporary, micro-sized digital content on social media platforms. The app allows creators to instantly connect with their audiences from a mobile interface by producing original videos, sharing stories, or broadcasting live.
Finally, explainer videos are proving to have great value for companies who want to increase their social media engagement by creating video content that introduces their brand or new product to target audiences. Seizing on this trend, LinkedIn has made it possible for its community consisting primarily of businesses and professionals to upload native video. Though this feature is currently only available on its mobile app, this is unlikely to be a limiting factor given the strong ongoing shift from desktops to mobile platforms.
Video content continues to be a major driver of innovation and fertile ground for digital outreach and marketing for companies who want to expand their engagement on social media. Though these changes create some challenges of their own, they also introduce opportunities for brands that are willing to take their social media marketing strategy to the next level.
Christian Golden, PhD, writes about tips and trends in digital marketing and social media for TrustRadius. His extracurricular interests include making music, reading comics, watching (really old) movies, and being in the great outdoors.
