The baby has arrived! Months of arduous work culminated in the birth of a video masterpiece, and it’s time to show it to the world.
If you did your due diligence (recommended), you’ve developed a comprehensive social media video marketing strategy (recommended) with a diverse set of new media distribution channels that you have calculated down to the penny are perfect for your 1) brand, 2) creative concept, 3) style of video, and 4) target audience.
Let’s face it. Your company’s marketing mix is wrong if it isn’t heavy on video and social media.
- Video is the best medium to communicate a brand’s message.
- Social platforms reach almost 3 billion people worldwide.
How big are social media platforms? Planet Earth’s total population is 7.9 billion people. There are 4.6 billion active global internet users, or 59.5% of the total population (Statista, 01/2021).
The Top 15 Social Media Channels
Social Media Platform Country Year Launched # of Active Users (07/21)
Facebook USA 2000 2.7 billion active users
YouTube USA 2005 2.2 billion active users
WhatsApp USA 2009 2.0 billion active users
Facebook Messenger USA 2008 1.3 billion active users
Instagram USA 2009 1.2 billion active users
WeChat China 2011 1.2 billion active users
TikTok China 2017 689 million active users
QQ China 1999 617 million active users
Douyin China 2016 600 million active users
Sina Weibo China 2010 511 million active users
Telegram Dubai 2013 500 million active users
Snapchat USA 2011 498 million active users
Kuaishou China 2015 481 million active users
Pinterest USA 2010 442 million active users
Reddit USA 2005 430 million active users
That is a lot of international online marketing real estate – and Twitter’s 300 million followers aren’t even on it! It’s hard to imagine that a business can still exist if they underestimate the importance and influence of social media networks, especially when 40% of the global population isn’t even on the internet yet.
Time to Get Technical
Video and social media are the perfect matches at the ideal time. Technological developments in streaming technology increased average upload/download speeds throughout the rise of social media, paving the way for video’s digital marketing dominance.
The download speeds required to stream video content are:
- 25 Mbps: sufficient for streaming 1080p HD video.
- 10 Mbps: sufficient for 720p video.
- 5 Mbps: sufficient for 480p video.
According to Speedtest Global Index, which “ranks mobile and fixed broadband speeds from around the world on a monthly basis,” as of June 2021, average download/upload speeds in the United States were:
- 45 Mbps/68.70 Mbps.
- 08 Mbps/13.67 Mbps for mobile.
Those speeds are more than high enough to stream high-quality videos and reduce or eliminate streaming issues.
According to Speedtest.net’s Speedtest Global Index, as of June 2021, global average download/upload speeds were:
- 61 Mbps/57.67Mbps.
- 34 Mbps/12.69 Mbps for mobile.
As global video start failures and buffering issues decline, and picture quality and bit rate increase, the video will continue to be the most effective way to communicate a brand’s message.
Dominant social media networks like Facebook will most likely continue to grow (or gobble up competitors), and new social media networks will continue to launch.
Likewise, the current infrastructure investment in nationwide 5G cellular networks accelerated mobile use in the U.S. (metric). As visual content becomes easier to watch on cellular networks, another surge in its marketing capabilities will occur.
The romance between video and social media is now a long-term relationship. Future growth, integration, and reach are likely, which will, in turn, spur innovations across the spectrum of stakeholders (e.g., technology, platforms, companies, marketers, end-users).
An intelligent high-level video social media policy can build a positive feedback loop of investment and return into the video-social media partnership.
Determine your Social Media Mix
Get the data! Conduct the necessary market research and develop a solid plan to execute your video marketing strategy that begins with concept and ends with distribution. If your team applies equal thought and care to every creative chain link, you maximize your video’s chance to succeed.
Let’s say your company (We Sell Stuff, Inc.) research concludes video marketing campaigns on three specific social media networks will best serve your marketing objectives.
You discover your target audience, and a new demographic you want to reach is scattered across three very different social media channels. Two of them are video content sharing sites (e.g., YouTube and TikTok), and one is a messaging service (e.g., Facebook Messenger and WeChat).
Armed with this knowledge, your marketing team can deep dive into the fine print of how each network operates, its cost, and its projected ROI.
Customization and Optimization
The fifteen social media networks listed above are all different. Even platforms integrated and cross-promoted like Facebook & Instagram have different rules and regulations, users, languages, customs, and ways to engage with content.
Social media users are savvy, especially on their preferred network. The type of content needs to match the social media channel. It would be best if you learned their language. Instructional videos may be great on YouTube but ignored on TikTok.
Social media video content like regular videos may work wonders on Instagram Stories but flop on Facebook Messenger. You get the idea. Creative and technical teams must collaborate to successfully transition between completing a video and releasing it into the wild.
We Sell Stuff, Inc. can now practically apply its due diligence to the process of customizing your video content for each social network. That’s creative. The resulting videos then need to be optimized for each social channel’s unique technology. That’s technical.
We Sell Stuff, Inc. has a great social media marketing strategy that identifies the ideal social media networks for its video titles. The company’s creative and technical teams, including video production professionals if hired, have a high level of expertise related to the social accounts and collectively customize and optimize video content to play on each one.
Analytics
One of the significant advantages of social media marketing is the volume and breadth of the analytics available to companies that invest the time to collect, analyze, and create actionable steps around the data’s conclusions.
Click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates are just several examples of metrics at marketers’ fingertips.
Whether you are monitoring your Google Ads buy with Google Analytics or using the metrics provided by the social media network hosting your content, you can find out whatever you need to know to make constant improvements to your overall strategy.
A big ship is hard to steer through a canal; it moves slow and may not avoid pitfalls in time. Social media is not a big ship, but many small, agile clippers that can change course with ease quickly.
We Sell Stuff, Inc. unleashes its market analysts and, after studying a statistically significant time frame of data, learn that high-quality content promoted on two of their social media networks far outperforms the third.
The analysts also discovered that two of the four types of videos in circulation have much higher engagement levels and conversion rates. As a result, We Sell Stuff, Inc. streamlines its video marketing strategy, and a measurable increase in ROI occurs.
Reach
Social media is the stone you toss into a pond that creates concentric expanding rings that ripple outward. If you promote your customized and optimized video across the proper social media accounts (and your website), it sets a process of organic growth in motion that has a limitless reach.
The most extreme version is when individual videos “go viral.”
Other ways in which video increase a message’s reach:
- Video ads remain online in perpetuity, which allows video views in perpetuity.
- Relevant content (aka Evergreen content) drives traffic through SEO long after a video is created and distributed.
- Video clips, video thumbnails, mini video teasers increase user engagement and continue to drive traffic through SEO long after they run.
- Social media posts, or even a blog post, that include video, also drive traffic through SEO long after they post.