Why Video Needs to Be Part of Your Social Strategy

Video should an integral part of any successful social media strategy. Online video consumption is at an all-time high and can quickly garner the attention your business, blog or brand needs. If you haven’t adopted video into your marketing repertoire, now’s the time!

Adding video to your social formula can take additional time and resources, but we’ll explain why it’s well worth the effort. Let’s take a look at why video needs to be part of your strategy.

Everyone is Watching

Do you know how many videos people watch online every day? As of 2016, Snapchat users watched a staggering eight billion videos per day, while over five hundred million hours of video was consumed daily on YouTube (and increases by 100% every year). This doesn’t even begin to account for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the bevvy of social networking sites that enable users to watch, post and react to videos across the globe.

Video Provides Additional Revenue

Videos boost conversion rates, garner online revenue, and lead to increased sales. Including product videos on landing pages and online stores can increase conversions by 80%. On social media, users are more likely to click-thru to your site from an embedded video compared to other forms of marketing.

Video is Attractive, Engaging and Shareable

When was the last time you couldn’t stop talking about that great whitepaper you read? How about that catchy business plan that went viral? Videos are, and will likely remain, the most exciting form of media marketing. They catch our attention faster than text and resonate with viewers on an emotional level.

Now that most platforms enable autoplay, there’s a greater chance you’ll hook a viewer while they’re scrolling through different posts. Sometimes the planets will align, and a video will go viral, ricocheting around the globe while garnering millions of views across multiple platforms.

Internet search engines prioritise video as well. According to Moovly, you’re 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google by having a video embedded on your website.

Video is More Memorable

We need not look further than Super Bowl commercials as an example of the lasting power of video. Whether a video is five seconds or three hours, it’s naturally more memorable than a photograph or a piece of writing.

Why can we easily describe the opening scene of Star Wars but not remember the first chapter of your school reading novel? Videos create an experience for the viewer, while photos and text can turn into tedious informational seminars. By creating and adding video to your website or marketing campaign, you increase the odds of being remembered, shared and talked about.

Video Makes Explanations Easy

Let’s imagine a world where you can only learn to tie shoes by reading an essay. You’d probably chuck your laces in a bin and wear slippers for the rest of your life.

Successful cooking blogs have adopted video into their social formula because users would rather see how a dish is made properly than read a recipe. Our time is valuable, which makes a 3-minute tutorial video much more attractive than reading a wall of text and parsing out the important bits.

Google’s 1-minute spot for Google Home quickly and efficiently demonstrates the possibilities of Google’s speech detecting smart home speaker. In 60 seconds, we learn that Google Home can control our lights and music, provide translations, and answer questions.

The commercial is engaging because Google is showing rather than telling, which leads us to our next point…

Videos Can Cross the Language Barrier

Video enables visual storytelling, and a great story can be told with just images. As a result, you can engage and explain your brand to almost anyone, anywhere. You can save on localisation fees while captivating a larger audience with a simple, concise message.

Food City—an American grocery store chain—ran an ad in 2013 that used visuals to tell an engaging and heartfelt story. While a large BBQ is being prepared, a military veteran dons his old uniform, makes his way to the front of the house, and walks outside to salute a returning soldier. Patriotic? Yes. Effective use of visual storytelling? Absolutely. And it's still remembered today.

Make Video a Part of your Strategy

Adding video marketing to your social strategy greatly enhances your brand. Videos are not only an effective way of communicating your brand, services and values, they expand your audience and amplify your engagement.

At BabbleHub, we help you do more with social media. We provide advanced social media tools that connect your social networks together, enabling you to post photos and videos across multiple channels easily. Track user engagement reports and see how each post and video is performing at any time of day, giving you the insight to hone your messaging and deliver memorable videos to the right audience at exactly the right time.