Building an Audience Through Video on Different Social Medias.
Videos and Animations are an excellent way to spread your business message and engage your audience. A well designed story with a good narrative, beautiful graphics and fluid animations can lift your Brand and show it to the world, like many other business did, going viral and experiencing a great and positive impact on sales. Videos can be built for any business size and its effectiveness are easily visible in all kinds of businesses. To understand why you should be investing on video let’s look at some relevant points.
Everything is surrounded by social media. Depending on the size or the state of your business, you probably don’t have a website yet, but already have a Facebook page or an account on any other social media. One of the greatest retainers of attention on these social platforms is video.
“YouTube attracts 136MM unique viewers per month… and 147.4MM Americans watch video on the internet.”
Source: Nielsen
As a reflection of the great impact videos has on the public, we started to analyze how other social medias were adapting and directing their content to be video based.
YouTube
Today’s main source of videos on the internet was one of the first social medias related only to video. It’s now the biggest and most active social network in the world.
Facebook and Twitter
Both recently adopted native videos. It means that they now encourage you to upload a video directly to their platform, instead of using an embedded link from sites like Youtube and Vimeo.
This way they can reduce the amount of people that were directed to another site because of the video and offer new features like autoplay for example, that only works on native videos.
One of the most engaging media nowadays, was originally based on images and lately has received an update to videos too. Users are now able to record or upload directly from their phone to the platform. It also has an auto-play feature, like Facebook.
Other new social medias like Vine, Snapchat, Periscope and Meerkat are totally based on videos and have been showing a great growth in active users.
Vine
A platform that gives you the power to create mini-stories that play in loop and are easily shareable with other social platforms. A fun fact of Vine is that it doesn’t count the number of views a video have, but instead, it counts how many loops of your video were watched by other people.
Snapchat
A very powerful tool for Storytellers and one of the most promising social network of the year, after releasing the Snapchat Stories features, they were able to retrieve the market they were losing to new social medias. User’s Stories have a duration of 24h and they are erased after they complete this time. This feature challenges content creators to develop something new every day and normal users to keep up with their friends activity, otherwise they can lose content.
As we usually say:
“It’s all about a good story”.
People love stories, and Snapchat encourages you, through video, to be telling something new every day.
Periscope and Meerkat
Two of the most recent social medias that were released this year (2015). Both are experiencing a great growth of users and their concept is almost the same. They allow you to create a live stream of video to your followers and they can engage with you in real time through chat.
As you can see, all social medias are working with video and not only that, researchers also preview that:
“Two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2016.”
Source: Cisco
Entrepreneurs and business need to pay a lot of attention to those new social medias. We all have a basic knowledge on how to use Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, but the secret for a business to stand out now is to be present on those new social medias. Snapchat and Vine are really powerful in terms of engagement, but businesses aren’t marketing or using it to create content and communicate with their clients.
If you wait for too long, other business will figure out how to get the best of those new social medias and you’ll lose a great opportunity to stand out.
Not everything should be embed
22% of U.S. small businesses plan to post a video to YouTube in the next 12 months to promote their businesses. (source: BIA/Kelsey)
Most businesses are starting to notice that change and are planning to create video content to their social media. Even more important than just creating any content, you must create a content that give your client a good experience. it’s good to plan well the video interaction between you and your public on each platform.
For example, when using Facebook to interact with your audience, it’s recommended to post native videos, even if you have the same video on your Youtube account. Why? Because native videos on facebook have the autoplay feature that is very powerful since it allows your video to be shown and to engage with many more people.
You need to create curiosity in the first seconds of the video, so they can stop scrolling and actually watch it. The flow of content is always there and standing out is hard if you don’t have a good story, idea or illustration.
Also, when you have many platforms, you’re able to have different audiences and your videos should reflect that. They need to communicate well in all kinds of networks.
Let your clients know that you can be found in more than one social media and engage with them where they are, using the language they understand. It will increase attraction, build value and help you build an audience.
Be active, be constant, be known
People notice consistency. Engage on all these platform with your public on a constant basis. If you post something today and only come with something a few weeks ahead, you won’t build an audience because they won’t be able to retain the value you are able to share. At least once a week, offer good content and valuable things to your clients.
If you think it takes time, spend 30 minutes a day (it can be after or before lunch time, for example) to plan and develop your next social media interaction. Also, understanding how each social media works, helps you to shoot that arrow closer to the bullseye.
Create content, be constant and build your audience.
If you understand how to interact using videos on each platform you can expect great results in a short term basis.
Originally published at mowestudio.com on July 1, 2015.
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