What is Social Video?
Social video is to long form content, what twitter was to blogging ten years ago. 140 characters eradicated the need for organisations to communicate via carefully crafted blogs posts. Now the big social media players are making it easy to communicate instantly with video hungry audiences. Once the realm of high budget marketing departments, video is now the common tongue.
Why and How to create Social Videos?
The players change but the game remains the same. When the online landscape changes its easy to be swept up in a tide of new jargon, but remember as marketers we keep doing the same thing. Reaching out to our audiences wherever they are and speaking their language. With video making up 74% of online traffic by 2017[1], and the big social platforms all hosting video, its clear where your attention should be.
Our objectives as marketers don’t change either with social video. Whether it’s brand awareness, recruitment, or explaining your service/product, it can all be achieved with social video. And because the distribution channels are taken care of, we can focus on creating the content.
There are some key characteristics of social video that will help you separate it from your broader video strategy.
First of all we are talking exclusively about short form content. With the exclusion of YouTube, social media platforms are specialising in bite size video, reflecting the short attention span of mobile users; Snapchat at 10 seconds, Twitter at 30 and Instagram at 15. This limitation can be a creative asset for marketers, forcing us to say something meaningful quickly, and save the detail for our long form outlets, where user engagement will be higher[2].
Social video also lets go of the industry’s hang up over viral, and embraces a more targeted, disposable type of content. Social video is about short-term wins, and reaching out to specific audiences immediately. Taking weeks to shoot and edit a video for a ten second Snapchat isn’t worth it. Among other things, user engagement tends to be lower with social video than with long form content[3], so we can’t spend too long creating it.
For medium sized businesses to keep up the necessary high frequency of social video, producing content at the same cost as your flagship video content isn’t feasible. A lot of your social video content can be gleaned or recycled from your wider video marketing efforts. For example B-roll footage, IPhone clips from behind the scenes, or simply re-edited content from your long form video.
Everything we know about the share-ability and engagement of marketing with video is still true. Social video is about short form, focused content, easily prepared and quickly consumed. It’s traditional video marketing letting it’s hair down and feeling impulsive.
To discuss your short form video objectives get in touch with or call us on + 44 (0) 207 729 5978
[1] http://syndacast.com/video-marketing-statistics-trends-2015/
[2] http://www.reelseo.com/video-success-2015-social/
[3] http://www.reelseo.com/impact-social-video/
