How To Benefit Big Time From Social Media Video

This may not be news to anybody by now, but video advertising is huge on social media, and it only stands to get bigger. Not only are there far more video ads on Facebook than there were just a few months ago, but online videos are expected to make up more than 80 percent of consumer Internet traffic by 2020.It's clear that video advertising is too big to be ignored by marketers, but how exactly can your brand benefit from social media videos? Let's take a look.

Improving Engagement

Social media engagement is the measure of public interactions such as likes and shares that content receives on any social media platform. It's as simple as clicking "like" on an amusing or insightful Facebook post, but there is more to it than that. A brand's commitment to social media engagement is a long-term one; you need to consistently post content that grabs users' attention, and a good video can do exactly that.

A well-produced video can act as a teaser for upcoming content and encourage users to go to your brand's website to learn more about what you have to offer, and it is more likely to grab and hold people's attention when they come across it on a Facebook feed. It also gives you a surefire way to know if your current marketing campaign is truly effective. There may not be a way to know if people have read a blog post to completion or if they had any kind of reaction to an image that you may have posted, but there are ways to see how many times a video has been played to completion.Even if the last video you posted on Facebook is only 30 seconds long, you can figure out if people are engaging with it by seeing how many times it has played all the way through. If it has been played several times, you're obviously on to something. If not, you can be sure that your audience isn't as engaged as they could be, which is a sign that you should switch things up.Videos also ensure that users will spend more time on your site. It's no secret that people will likely spend only a few seconds on a website before they click onto something else, and those same people will likely scroll past the vast majority of their Facebook walls and Twitter feeds without a second thought. However, taking the time to watch a fun 30-second or minute-long video means that users are stopping to see what you have to offer, which will make them more likely to purchase your products or visit your website.

Brand Awareness

It's not easy to determine how many people are truly aware of your brand. Yes, you can plaster your brand's logo everywhere, but that doesn't guarantee that people are actually paying attention to it. For all you know, it could register as nothing more than something that people see in the background of their lives. On the other hand, the average person is far more likely to remember a clever video ad.On top of that, video seems to build more trust among users than other content or forms of marketing. Videos are simply more likely to stick in a person's mind, and thinking back to a clever short video might be what jogs their memory about a brand that would otherwise forget all about.

Increasing Web Traffic

As effective as videos are when it comes to increasing brand awareness and improving engagement, they aren't as effective for closing a sale online. On the other hand, they are excellent when it comes to driving traffic to a website. In fact, that is the biggest reason why so many companies are using social video as part of their marketing campaigns these days. The idea is that a video will grab someone's attention, usually with a rhetorical question or by introducing an issue or problem that needs to be solved.As the video goes on, the brand that produced the video will be introduced as a solution to the given problem. The viewer becomes curious and wants to find out more, so they follow a link that might be posted at the end of the video to the website, giving more traffic and (hopefully) making a purchase from the company. It really is the ideal method of increasing website traffic, especially on social media.

Generating Excitement for a Brand

Finally, social video is great when it comes to generating excitement for a brand or a product. You can see this in how excited people get about 30-second trailers for movies that won't actually come out for several months. A brief snippet about a movie that may not actually be any good and may not even be complete yet will generate more buzz than just about any other news story at any given time.Brands can use that kind of excitement to drive sales and anticipation for new products and services that they are planning to offer. All you need is to come up with a good hook that gets people to watch a 30-second video. There are obviously some great reasons to work social video into your marketing campaign, but you also need to know how to implement these videos.First of all, you will need to keep them short; social media users scroll through their feeds quickly, and they probably won't be willing to sit through a video that is too long. Second, keep it relevant to your brand. You should know at least something about your brand's core demographic by now, so make sure that you're producing videos that appeal to them. Third, pay attention to which videos are being viewed to completion and which ones are driving the most traffic to your website.Good marketing campaigns are about experimentation, so don't be afraid to drop videos and strategies that currently aren't working in favor of something that is more appealing to your core audience. Finally, don't give up. Social media moves at practically the speed of light, so going too long without posting new videos will hurt you more than any other misstep that you can make on social media.