According to Twitter, there were more than one million sign-ups for its live streaming app Periscope in the ten days after its 26 March launch.
Video is hardly a new medium for social networks – in fact, in January this year Facebook reported that people globally are uploading 75% more videos than they did a year ago. But what is new – and highlighted by this data – is that they’re making video easier to do than ever before. And paid social campaigns can reap the benefits.
Last year, for example, Facebook introduced Autoplay videos – and people (and brands) can now upload directly to the likes of Facebook and Twitter without having to embed via YouTube. There are also vastly improved tracking and analytics algorithms available for social video.
On top of this, Facebook has enabled calls to action to be embedded at the end of videos, to help move consumers through the purchase channel immediately after viewing, while Twitter’s in-line video feature allows advertisers to attach video cards to promoted tweets – not to mention the opportunities for them to get involved with live streaming through Periscope.
What this all means is that exciting times lie ahead – and video has become an invaluable tool for paid social campaigns in a way that was unthinkable five years ago.
So how do brands take advantage of these opportunities in their paid social activity? Most importantly, they need to understand the audiences involved – mapping the channels and networks and how video works for each.
For Facebook, that means short, snappy videos that still work when you play them without sound, because the video autoplays within the user’s feed. So the graphics, colours and movement of the video all need to captivate their audience from the first seconds to make them want to press the button to hear the audio.
Twitter, on the other hand, often demands ‘extreme relevance’ – tying the video into current news and trending topics. Just look at Oreo’s famous tweet following the power outage at the 2013 Super Bowl – video-based ads on Twitter may need a similar level of real-time reactive speed.
And of course, being able to promote videos quickly means making more of them so they’re available to offer. Video has become ‘snackable’ hygiene content that consumers expect as the norm.
It’s not like there are technology issues stopping brands from doing this, either. There is a profusion of platforms and ad networks that allow video-based and programmatic paid social campaigns, and the camera equipment required to create a video ad can be as simple as a smartphone.
In fact, one of the most memorable video-based paid social campaigns focuses specifically on the ease of making mini-movies. Camera brand GoPro has focused much of its activity on user-generated video content with no need for an art director or videographer, just giving cameras to athletes and letting them loose. In fact, it’s rather broken the traditional model.
And like any other ad campaign, paid social video works best when it plays into our emotions. The now-famous Always #LikeAGirl campaign did exactly that – delivering video via social networks on an emotive and potentially sensitive topic in a genuine way and garnering over 50 million YouTube views in the process.
With programmatic taking over an increasingly sophisticated paid social landscape, brands are looking for ways to deliver exceptional and highly relevant content that gets shared and becomes part of the social media conversation. Video, unsurprisingly, is leading the charge.
By Steve Sponder, managing director of Headstream.
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