Like, Link, Share, Tweet – How to make the most of online video

Video is the fastest growing content type shared across the Web today. According to Cisco, 90 percent of consumer Web traffic will be video by 2015.[1]A comScore report released in March this year found that 78 percent of Singapore’s Internet audience aged 15 and above watch online videos on a monthly basis.[2]

The other fast growing component is social media, which is becoming more powerful every day. Singaporeans have taken enthusiastically to social media. According to Socialbakers, an online social media analytics platform, there are over 2.5 million users from Singapore. That is more than 55 percent of the total population.[3] The influence of social media on online video is apparent when another comScore report released in July this year found that 50 percent of Internet users regularly share videos, with more than half viewing online videos with others.[4]

These developments give new meaning to the phrase “business without borders”. Relationships and connections are codified to spread content and ideas. Customers are responding directly to their favourite brands.Businesses competing for consumers’ eyeballs and wallets realise that people are willing to pay more attention to a 30 second video than to a page of text.

So what can you do as a business to harness the power of social profiles to build brand awareness, nurture customer relationships, and improve your SEO visibility on the Web?

Video and Social Media: A Match Made in Heaven
Video is a powerful and potent medium. Moving images show the full range of human emotion, topped only by talking to someone face to face.

Video wants to be shared. It reaches its highest impact when it goes viral.
High quality production is getting cheaper by the day, and cameras are now on mobile phones.

The Business of Social Media
To get the most out of social media for your business, you need to be clear about the business goals you want to achieve for your business through video and social media.

These goals can include:

Traffic: Videos, whether or not they go viral, will inevitably drive more traffic to your site. A Forrester report shows that online video dramatically improves SEO. Pages with video stand up to 50 times better chance than text pages alone of showing up on the first page of Google search results.[5]Sites with video are also more likely to be clicked in search results because videos grab searchers’ attention in text based search results. An example of this is Australian brand aussieBum. The company successfully drives sales of its men’s apparels through the video channel on its website aussieBum.com.

Awareness: By making use of social media, businesses can foster word-of-mouth promotions passed from customers to their own networks with incredible ease. The introduction of Facebook “like” buttons and click-to-share features removes all friction to make sharing a seamless and natural activity. For example, UK retailer Marks &Spencer worked with an agency called Adjust Your Set to build videos with a branded skin customised with the company’s distinctive look and feel. Marks & Spencer also uses call to action buttons to accompany these videos, enabling viewers to play them in Facebook and share amongst friends.

Engagement: Marketers want both potential and returning customers to have a reason to stay on your site. Media publishers wantviewers to come back, thus increasing impressions. Engaging video content can keep people on your site longer. Socially shared videos have high engagement rates, which results in longer, more meaningful impressions that can influence the viewer. Shared video offered up to 18 percent longer viewing time compared to video viewed through search results, Brightcove and TubeMogul research showed.[6]

Loyalty: Fresh video content gives loyal customers reasons to continue to engage with your company, especially if you continually share with customers that are following your activity through their Facebook or Twitter feeds.

Evangelists: Social sharing is quite possibly the easiest way for companies to empower their fans to evangelise and share their enthusiasm for your company with their followers. For instance, Thomas Pink, the UK garment producer and another Adjust Your Set customer, lets its customers share their favourite clothing on Facebook with a single click.

Remember - publishing through social media outlets is really all about context. By delivering video in the places where users spend their time, you have more chances of making a strong impression. Feeds are the new context. Putting your video in the social feed context lets customers interact with your content in their own preferred mode of consumption.

[1] Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2010-2015, http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/...
[2] State of the Internet with a Focus on Southeast Asia, http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/Stat...
[3] Singapore Facebook Statistics, http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/singapore
[4] Online Video by Numbers, http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/Onli...
[5]The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google, http://blogs.forrester.com/interactive_marketing/2009/01/the-easiest-way...
[6] Brightcove research: http://go.brightcove.com/forms/en-video-and-social-media 

Alyssa Chew-Nair, Head of Marketing for Asia Pacific, Brightcove. You can follow Alyssa on twitter: @alyssachew.

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