Social video: Video Marketing Through Social Media
“Social video†is the new way U.S. brands are gaining leverage from the combination of video’s enormous multi-sensory appeal and the sharing power of social networks. Considering video’s appeal as an ad vehicle, compared with static banner ads, video ads get vastly higher clickthrough rates: 2.84% versus .1%, according to a June 2012 study from MediaMind.
Considering the power of social media, video brand messages designed for social sharing gain access to vastly larger audiences than were originally targeted. A recent study by the video ad platform provider Visible Measures reported a 77.6% jump in social video ad views served over its network: 1.33 billion views in the first quarter of 2012, compared to 747 million the prior quarter.
No surprise, YouTube is far and away the leading venue for social video campaigns. According to comScore, YouTube enjoyed over 150 million unique visitors in August of 2012. Facebook, the runner-up, had 48 million unique video viewers in the same period. But Facebook is where most of the sharing happens. More than 72% of all video pass-along originated on Facebook.
Chart: Vehicles used for sharing video ads
| Vehicle | Percent of total video ads shared |
| 72.2% | |
| 8.5% | |
| Tweets | 7.4% |
| URL shares | 6.8% |
| 2.7% | |
| Google+ | 1.5% |
| 1% |
Source: Sharethrough, October 2012
After viewing “social video†ads from Fortune 500 companies, consumers are taking one of four actions, according to a September 2012 study by the opt-in video platform provider Jun Group: 31% visit the brand’s Facebook page; 28% click to the brand’s website; 21% replay the video; and 17% visit the brand’s YouTube page.
Video is having a strong positive impact on consumer online sales, by increasing consumer confidence in the quality and applicability of a produce under purchase consideration. Consumers indicate they are less likely to return a product purchased online, and more engaged with the brand, after viewing videos at e-commerce sites.
Chart: Consumer attitudes to online product videos
| Consumer attitude | Percent |
| More confident when I watch a product video in advance of making a purchase and thus less likely to return that product | 52% |
| More confidence in the purchases I made after watching a related video online | 51% |
| Willing to stay on a website longer because product videos are available | 45% |
| More engaged with a retailer or brand manufacturer as a result of videos they make available about products they sell | 44% |
| More likely to return to a retailer who integrates videos into their website experience | 41% |
| Purchase more products on websites that allow me to learn about products via video | 37% |
| Spend more time on websites where video is present | 35% |
| Purchase products on websites as a result of being influenced by videos on their sites | 31% |
Source: Invodo study, “Delivering Superior Shopping Experiences via Video,†March 2012.
But brand and product advertising videos are not the only video vehicles that are working for marketers. A Google study showed that apparel buyers are referring to other kinds of videos during their online shopping process, specifically, consumer generated videos (26%) and ads that appear on video content streaming websites (16%). This data reinforces the importance of content marketing, and the power of video as a content-marketing tool.
Using social channels to distribute video messages also gives advertisers a wider set of metrics than they can get from typical website publishers when they run video ads. The most popular metrics appear in the following chart.
Chart: Video marketing metrics
Top video marketing metrics used by advertisers and agencies in North America, 2012
| Metric | Percent using |
| Brand lift | 54% |
| Completion rate | 31% |
| Clickthrough rate | 25% |
| Gross rating points | 16% |
| Click per view | 6% |
Source: Adaptv and DIGIDAY study, “Video State of the Industry Reportâ€
So, what do we know about best practices in social video marketing? Here’s a round-up of tips:
- Make all video content socially sharable, with links and functionality to make it easy to send to email, to social networks, to blogs, and web pages.
- The optimal length for YouTube videos is 60-90 seconds.
- Video production values are less important than useful, relevant content.
- Use keywords not only in the video title and description, but also the file name.
- Don’t accept YouTube’s automated thumbnail image. Instead, select the most appealing thumbnail image at the point of upload.
- Use hashtags specific to the video’s subject when tweeting about the video.
- Add closed-caption titles to your video using YouTube’s free transcript upload feature. This makes your videos much more SEO friendly, as well as understandable with speakers turned off.
- Integrate your video everywhere, with social sharing links, to get the widest possible distribution. This means your website, emails, landing pages, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, the works.
When advertisers use video, and add social sharing, their brands get more views, more followers, more engagement, and more sales.