Marketers are constantly looking for ways to reach, resonate and engage with their audience via social media. The demographic most marketers are dying to reach is millennials. Social video dominates the 18-33 year-old demographic and 92% of mobile users share videos with others. That’s pretty telling. Video is versatile and can be sliced, diced and served a number of ways to fit your strategy. Not to mention social platforms have made a major shift to video. Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat are trailblazing with live video. Instagram launched Instagram Stories earlier this month. Twitter enables native video and Pinterest announced that native video player will be coming soon to their platform.
Uses For Video
Building brand awareness – What better way to tell your story than with video? Inform. Entertain. Bring forth the essence of your brand. Use video to exhibit the true you. Make it shareable and get your name out there!
Offering value – Don’t just get your name out there, make it stay. In order to keep your audience captivated, you’ll need to provide them with something of value. There is a myriad of ways to use video to do this. From how-to videos to tips’n tricks, finding a way to add value will keep your audience’s attention.
Baptist Health offers value by sharing healthier recipes via video.
Customer engagement/support — Solely thinking of video as a means to entertain would be missing the mark completely. Find areas of opportunity for your brand to add personalization into its marketing and utilize video there. What if you responded with support videos online instead of a 140-character tweet? What if you incorporated “thank you” videos into your email marketing campaigns? Video enables you to be more authentic and personal with your customers.
Are the gears turning now?
Be Thoughtful.
When coming up with a strategy, think about how you’ll use and execute video. Will you incorporate long-format video or solely stick to short videos? Will you incorporate live video? Facebook has taken the lead on live video and has even provided some tips for using Facebook Live.
Be able to answer “why”. Why will people share this video? Think about how you’ll share it. Don’t just make a video to post on every channel with the caption, “check out our latest video!” Be strategic and thoughtful from the get-go.
Once you gather your ideas and devise a strategy, you can begin creating! Social Media Examiner offers some useful tools for video creation. Now, you execute! Just like other organic posts you make, think about timing. Post videos and create live videos when your audience is online and engaging.
Do not forget to measure results.
All too often we get so caught up in the busyness of strategizing and creating that we forget to go back and look at results. The data is what should help drive your content creation forward. This also gives you an opportunity to capitalize on what is working really well by repurposing that content for further future engagement. The results also enable you to see what you need to stop doing or change.
If you’re not using video in your social media strategy, there’s no doubt that you need to consider it. The question you will need to answer is, how?
If you need help discovering innovative ways for your business to utilize social video, contact us.
