There’s been an explosion of growth in video on social media in recent years. Views of branded video content have increased 99% on YouTube and 258% on Facebook between 2016 and 2017. On Twitter, a video Tweet is 6x more likely to be retweeted than a photo Tweet. If you haven’t taken a closer look at the power of social media and video together, you’re in for a surprise. The numbers are big. Really big.
“I see video as a megatrend,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, February 2017
We could go on and on with more numbers like that, but it’s better to show you. Let’s see how brands are driving dramatic growth with video on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.
Facebook has the largest audience of any social network, with more than 2.07 billion monthly active users. That’s more than one-third of the world’s population, and a whole lot of those people are watching video. Around 100 million hours of video are watched every day on Facebook. Like YouTube, Facebook has a massive and diverse audience, which makes it harder to characterise than the emoji-filled landscape of SnapChat. The overall point to remember about Facebook is that people come to be entertained. In other words, cat videos. Last year, for instance, a video titled “How to wrap your cat for Christmas 101” got more than 80 million views and 405,000 shares.
Moving Pictures Boost Engagement
Video can also lead directly to sales. Studies show that 74% of users who watched an explainer-video about a product subsequently bought it. So better start crafting your exciting product videos now! If you think about it, the effectiveness of video is not even that surprising. After all, vision is our most dominant sense. Most information transmitted to our brain is visual. So if already pictures can boost engagement massively, imagine what moving pictures can do to your business.
Google Loves Videos
Videos allow you to increase the time spent by visitors on your site. Thus, longer exposure builds trust and signals search engines that your site has good content. Moovly gives us whopping statistics: You’re 53 times more likely show up first on Google if you have a video embedded on your website. Since Google now owns YouTube, there has been a significant increase in how much videos affect your search engine rank.
Video Appeals to Mobile Users
Video and mobile go hand in hand. 90% of consumers watch videos on their mobile. From Q3 of 2013, mobile video views have grown more than 233 percent. YouTube reports mobile video consumption rises 100% every year. Since people like to watch videos on the go, and the number of smartphone users is growing, your video audience keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Video Marketing Can Explain Everything
Are you launching a new product or a service? Create a video to show how it works. 98% of users say they’ve watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service. That is why 45% of businesses who use video marketing said that they have an explainer video on their home page. Of those businesses, 83% said that their homepage explainer video was effective.
Trying to explain a difficult concept? Create animated videos. Animation can bring concepts to life that no text or live video can. Besides, boring talking heads are not enough anymore to break through the clutter. Animated videos are a perfect combination of entertainment, nostalgia, and simplicity. And they work.
Video Builds Trust
Trust is the foundation of conversions and sales. But building trust should be a goal on its own. The whole concept of content marketing is based on trust and creating long-term relationships. Stop selling and let the people come to you by providing them interesting and useful information. I couldn’t have said it better than Mark Schaefer, the Executive Director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions:
“The new era demands a focus on ignition, not just content, on trust, not just traffic, and on the elite people in your audience who are spreading and advocating your content.”
Video does it all. Video content is likely to engage us and ignite emotions. And when we talk about elite people in the audience, YouTubers have become the most powerful social media figure to promote your brand. So, if you are serious about content marketing, you must be serious about video, too.
Promotional videos can foster trust as well. Some consumers are still skeptical about buying products and services on the internet because they fear fraud and cheating. But effective marketing videos present your products in a conversational form. That creates a sense of individual approach which is why 57% of consumers say that videos gave them more confidence to purchase online.
Final Thoughts
Undoubtedly, video marketing is one of the newest additions to your promotion toolbox. You might still have your doubts. Is it really worth to consider using videos for promoting your business? Do you have enough resources to create and use video content in your marketing? The answer is simple: Yes, it’s worth it. Not only because everyone’s doing it but because video is one of the most versatile and profitable digital marketing tools out there.