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All marketing professionals and business owners understand the power of video marketing. In fact, 87% of online marketers use video.
and 22% of Small Business Owners plan to post a video in the next 12 months. Those same marketers and business owners also understand that social media has become an essential part of any marketing plan. Now, combine the two and you have the power of social video marketing.
Is your company leveraging social video the way that it should be? You should. According to Inc., 76% of marketers say video marketing has had a direct impact on business.
What is Social Video?
Social video is a video marketing technique that takes place on various social media platforms. These can include Facebook, Twitter, and even YouTube. It’s not the same as video marketing, which focuses on using video mainly on your website, product pages, or landing pages. However, it does share many of the same techniques.
By moving your video marketing to yours social media networks, you’re connecting with your customers on their platform. This is an important distinction to remember. When a video is posted on your website, more than likely people have come to that page to find certain information. But when you’re posting on social media, your followers aren’t necessarily looking for information about your company or a specific product. They just happen to follow you and your post appeared on their feed.
That’s why posting the right content on the right platform is so important. According to the same Inc. article, Small Business Owners and marketing professionals find Facebook the most impactful and easiest to gauge success when it comes to social video marketing.
Don’t fear! Read our article on How to Grow Your Business with Social Video Marketing to learn more!
Benefits of Social Video
- Emotional Connection
- Brand Loyalty
- Create Trust
- Lead Generation
- Propel Conversation
The last one is the most important. You want to use social video to create more engagement that will increase brand awareness and generate more leads. The best way to achieve this is through the “free” advertising social media engagement provides. The more often your social videos are shared, the more impressions your videos will receive.
Create Engagement Through Social Video
Your social media strategy needs to be focused on engagement. That means you need to create videos worth sharing. Website visitors are 64% more likely to buy your product after watching a video. Create exciting, short videos worthy of sharing. And always make sure to include a link to a purchasing page. While it’s unlikely that you’ll get 64% through social video, you still want to make purchasing your product as easy as possible after viewing a video.
Make your videos entertaining, funny, and unique. That doesn’t mean they have to be cheesy or over the top. Stay true to your brand and your objectives. Focus on what separates your brand and product to create brand awareness. If you’re in a serious industry or sell a serious product, making a corny, funny video series probably won’t help your sales.
One of the best parts of social video is that the metrics are easy to track and normally viewable to everyone. Are people watching your video? Are people sharing it?
If you want people to share and engage with your social videos, keep your target audience in mind and your platform. More than likely, the same video won’t find success on both Facebook and LinkedIn. Follow the best practices of each platform to avoid alienating or even losing followers.
Use Social Video to Grow Social Media Presence
Remember, you probably won’t get it right the first time, or even every time. That doesn’t mean social video marketing isn’t beneficial and that you should stop. It just means there’s a learning curve to matching your goals and objectives with what your target audience is looking for. Just like your blog, quantity will help you in the long run. The more videos you have, the more you can share. And the more you share, the more your community can share too!
Creating and posting more videos will also help create an environment of video on your social platforms. For instance, Moz founder and former CEO Rand Fishkin releases a “Whiteboard Friday” video every week. Now, that has become one of the biggest parts of the Moz brand (as well as their cartoonish logo) and it’s shared across every social media platform Moz is active on. Not to mention that Moz has created a dedicated audience who look forward to the weekly series.
Create a brand focused on video and, if you’re providing something unique and useful, people will share it.
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