By 2019 80% of the world’s traffic will be video. With this in mind it is an important consideration for any business to implement video into their marketing strategy, to ensure that their messages don’t get lost amidst the sea of video. Social media is one of the best places to post videos so that your customers, or potential customers can interact and share with your brand’s messaging. For this reason we took some time to look at why a business should use video on social media
When you first think of social media and video the first platform that probably comes to mind is YouTube. YouTube is a great platform for any business. Not only will it allow you to host your videos and easily share them or embed them to your website, once you have your account set up you can go about using YouTube’s multiple ad products in order to specifically target the market that you want to see your video ad.
This is a great option for any business but it can be difficult to get views on the YouTube platform. About 300 minutes of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute so it can be very easy for your brand’s video to be swallowed up into the great abyss. For this reason it is important to consider integrating your video ads with Facebook. Facebook video has really taken off in the last year with an increase in video views from 4 billion per day to 8 billion per day in just six months. One of the great benefits to uploading your videos to Facebook directly is because you’re adding them to your business Facebook page that you have already set up. People have liked your page so are happy to hear from you, so a video catered around your business could potentially gain more views than on YouTube because you already have an interested audience.
78% of people said that social media has influenced purchasing decisions. So it is important to ensure that you have the best content on your social media sites. With over 1 billion users your target market is on Facebook, and Facebook ad products allow you to specifically target the most relevant audience to you. When you set up a video ad to serve it will appear in your target audience’s timeline. They can then click to go to your Facebook page if they want to learn more about your business. Your Facebook page is a great medium to drive traffic back your site, and with the launch of Facebook stores, some e-commerce businesses can even conduct all their business through their Facebook page.
Using social media as a platform for your video ads is cheaper than using traditional platforms such as television for this reason you can focus your budget on creating multiple videos for your social media platforms. This gives you the opportunity to customise for specific audiences. So you can have videos to showcase different products and target them at different target markets.
Snapchat is one of the most popular social media platforms and brands are starting to see the value of sharing short videos using the platform. Snapchat however is a bit of a different animal and won’t work for every business. For one the target audience for Snapchat is much more niche than that of YouTube or Facebook, but if you’re looking to target the 18-24 year old audience Snapchat could be a big consideration for you. You also have to consider that the format is a lot different, people will always want interesting content, but especially on Snapchat. The content tends to be a lot more off the cuff rather than a video that has been overly produced.
The videos that you post on social media do not have to be expensive and over produced. They just need to be engaging and entertaining. Where possible you should strive to get your message across in the first 5 seconds. If you’re stuck for original content consider using stock footage to portray your message, this has multiple benefits. For one, you won’t have to spend extra money on creating original content. Interestingly enough Facebook are also fans of stock footage because there’s little chance of copyright infringement and they even have many stock footage images pre-approved for advertisement purposes.
Whatever you do in your video and wherever you post it, just make sure you have at least one, before you get left behind. Create an engaging video ad at www.viddyad.com
