Should you hire social creators to create videos on your brand social media or their own channels?
If you have branded social media pages, already with a significant following, presumably of your target customers, then is there any advantage to hiring social creators to publish branded videos on their own channels?
At first it could seem like an unappealing prospect — giving up an element of control for what appears to be the same reach.
However, there are significant benefits to going outside your branded social media which should be weighed in your decision.
Advantages of hiring social creators to make branded videos for your company on their own social media
The algorithms on social media pages means that often not all your followers on your brand profiles will be reached per post.
The reason being that the algorithm measures response and engagement to decide if the post is valuable — the more valuable, the higher the probability it will reach more people.
The main key performance indicator for this is engagement rate.
Our analysis shows that creator pages with similar number of followers and niches as the equivalent brand page have at least a 15 per cent higher engagement rate.
Therefore, even if the brand pages had more followers, the creator would still reach more people.
In addition, posting the video on the creator page could help you reach new people or reactivate your own people if there is an overlap between your brand followership and the creator’s.
It could also help you target people neither following your page or the creator’s page because the social media algorithm will identify the content as engaging and push it through its own channels — thus your CPM will go down.
Ultimately then, posting your branded videos on the creator’s page is more efficient because of their higher engagement rate, reaching more people, re-engaging your followers and targeting audiences outside both your followerships.
Lastly, posting on the creator’s page also makes the production of content much faster — whereas you might be able to publish a video every month, creator’s can publish every day.
Advantages to posting branded videos on your brand social media over a creator’s page
However, this is not to say there are no advantages to publishing on your own brand social media.
The first, most striking, point is control. Inevitably, you lose some creative control by allowing creators to make videos for you and post them on their channels.
Also, reusing the content is more complicated as you will need to negotiate licencing and buy out rights. Further, you could be subjected to price changes from the creator or lose your placement to competitors, however, much of this can be fixed in a contract.
Finally, and more relevant if you are an e-commerce brand, promotion rebate is difficult as it will be more complicated for the creator to promote both your brand and another brand you are promoting in the video.
There are advantages to both publishing branded videos on your branded social media if it is well followed and to publishing on the creator’s pages and they should be weighed against each other to find a solution that is right for your marketing, however, social media algorithms tend to be slanted toward creator’s pages.
