How many times have you visited a social media platform website like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn today? Once, 10, maybe a hundred times? The average person is using their mobile device and visiting social media platforms more than ever.
With so many people actively on these platforms and content going live every few seconds, there is an endless stream of content and advertisers trying to reach new eyeballs daily. Unfortunately, most of this content is going live, but never getting the views, clicks, or engagement they deserve.
In order to reach valuable audiences through social media, your content needs to be attention-seeking and provide value. While these content creation tips are pretty much a given, even more important is that you have the ability to grab the attention of a user within a second or two of time. This is why link bait has worked extremely well for content-based websites and brands over the past several years.
As we all continue to use social media more on a daily basis, we are all seeing less text-based content, and that everything seems to be moving towards visuals, video, an instant gratification. Even the advertisements on Facebook and within applications are usually just a few seconds long. This is due to the fact that you want to keep an audience engaged, but not distracted in the process.
While we are all active on social media, it’s not just online marketers and brands that are realizing how big and powerful this shift in content and media has become. It’s also content creation and marketing agencies as well. For example, simpleshow has released the following stats how much of an impact we are seeing in the transition from text to video based content and marketing messaging.
- Within 3 years 90% of all internet traffic will be video
- 60% of on-line videos are watched on YouTube/Google; 28% on Facebook
- A video is 50 times more likely than any other web property to appear on the front page of Google for a search query
- 32% of people who watch on-line videos do it because they actively want to find out about a product or service before purchasing
- 8% of people who watch a video to find out about a service/product will then always click on the brand website
- 10 minutes is the average amount of time people spend watching on-line videos in a single session
- 82% of tablet owners watch an on-line video on their device at least three times a week; 78% of iPhone owners do the same
- 56% of people who are on-line watch videos every day
- 51% of all on-line video consumption happens between 18:00 and 21:00
With all of this in mind, it’s important to realize what is working out there and how your brand can start doing the same. The last thing you want to do is to create a new social media ad campaign and spend countless hours on content, only to release it to the public and then find no social shares or engagement. Instead, you should be using all of your efforts to better market your best content and also to create new content at the same time — through the use of online video.
Let’s now take a look at the best performing types of videos being seen on social media today.
4 Types of Social Videos that Drive the Most Engagement
According to Instapage, there are four different types of videos that generate the most interest, views, and shares on social media. These stats and results will also vary based on the platform you are looking at. Right now video is absolutely killing on the likes of Facebook and Instagram, but platforms like Twitter are still focused on photo and image-bases social updated — however, this is likely to change as the universal switch to video continues over the next several years.
1. News and trending topics
More often than not, new topics and hashtags are going to be trending every single day — if not hourly. These are going to be the most popular content pieces on the internet as they a trending topic and grabbing the most attention by audiences around the world. When in video form, these content pieces will likely perform even better.
If you are a news website or looking to cash in on this trending topic, it would be a great idea to make a quick 30 second video explaining why everybody is searching and writing about this topic. This also provides your content with the opportunity to go viral as well.
There are plenty of Facebook Pages focused just on creating short videos on such daily topics, which allow them to build up hundreds of thousands (or even millions of followers online). You can see a great example of one here.
And when it comes to grabbing the attention of your audience on platforms like Twitter — which aren’t as video friendly, don’t forget the options of using animated YouTube gifs within your content as well. With a bunch of different automated creation tools out there, you can easily take a YouTube video URL and turn it into an animated GIF within seconds. Or, you can simple start looking through the massive supply online that is easily accessible through Facebook and Twitter when adding a new update through such platforms.
Just remember… eye-catching engagement is key. Who wouldn’t want to see this adorable picture and stop to see what else you wrote?
2. Stories that evoke emotion
The most attractive videos on social media are often the ones that start off with a nice link bait that might show a picture of a famous person, motivational quotes, or an animal in distress that is waiting to be safe.
The common theme among all of these videos is that they likely evoke emotion with an end-user. What starts off as a few seconds of trying to watch the video to see what it’s about, likely ends up with the end-user being hooked and watching at least a couple of minutes of video.
The Magic Show actually does an amazing job at this. The Facebook page by Rick Lax started off as one thing, then it started going crazy when he got more creative with his titles and videos. You can see a few below and how many of them are well over the one million view mark, or quickly approaching.
These videos work great for getting the attention of a user and also getting them started in a process. While most videos like this on social media are just used for increasing social shares, grabbing new followers and branding, you likely won’t find many of them being used by businesses or to make sales.
However, there are some rumors out that there that pages with over a million fans/followers, go for a nice amount of money, or can actually become their own marketing agency!
3. Videos that teach something
If you want to actually convert audiences into a sale or bring in new customers one of the best ways to accomplish this is to create videos that are focused on teaching something. When someone actually takes the time to search for something online, if they find a reliable and trustworthy solution, they are much more likely to act upon it — versus just randomly seeing an advertisement online.
Looking at the internet marketing space and money making opportunities, teaching people how to make money online is something that we have seen for many years now. Many gurus and branding experts will create short videos that often lead into a webinar sign up. While these are great for building a mailing list and branding, it’s the video and learning aspect that starts the whole engagement process.
A perfect example of this can be seen in the whiteboard explainer video below, that focuses on learning a different language. This is something nearly everyone would like to accomplish, but the concept just seems to hard and time consuming. However, with a video explainer in place, it’s much easier.
Once a user starts to see how easy it is to start learning a different language (or any task) when using the combination of audio, visuals, and video, they are much more likely to continue with the learning process. This is also why explainer videos are used on landing pages and long-form sales pages… they work!
If you are selling any type of product or service online that provides value to an audience, then you should definitely be using online videos as a quick way to grab the attention of your audience, show them how a specific task or action can be solved, and then give them your product or solution as the way to fix whatever they’re trying to do.
Best of all, you won’t need to hire a design agency to create such videos, as there are plenty of drag and drop solutions out there.
4. Behind-the-scenes peeks
Another interesting concept for online videos is to create ones based on things that the average person doesn’t necessary do or experience within their daily life. For example, imagine how many people are searching about ‘how hot dogs are made’ or other crazy things that you really just don’t want to know about or simply have no idea. Only video can deliver the type of engagement users are looking for here. Text and static images won’t do the trick.
Another good example is unboxing videos when a new product comes out like an iPhone or a new computer. People will jump on their video camera and open the box, and while this is nothing amazing, these videos tend to get millions of views. In fact, if you head over to Google right now and search for “youtube unboxing”, you will see something like the results below.
From a business perspective this model can also prove useful to any businesses or brands that have a physical location and want to teach their clients more about the people that work in the company and how they prescribed diet to their customers. This is also working very well for beauty vloggers that are getting sponsorships from brands and doing review videos, or visiting the company locations where their favorite products are being made.
For businesses and brands, creating a behind-the-scenes video of your location, the people that work there and what it’s like on a daily basis is a great way to provide value and also build a trust from customers.
How to Take Advantage of Online Video in 2020 and Beyond!
Now that you’ve had the opportunity to walk through some of the most popular methods for creating videos online, you should start looking at content and videos in your social media feed in a whole new way. Next time you see an advertisement, don’t skip over it right away. Think about which of these four categories the video actually falls into and how they are engaging with their audience.
Then, it’s probably time for you to start using one of these methods to create videos for your own brand. Social media is here to stay and more people are using their mobile devices to view social media content than ever before. Text content is simply not as effective as it used to be and now people want instant gratification. Video is the best way to deliver to such audiences.
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