Video is an effective marketing medium, and pros are taking note. Four in five businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 65 percent of companies who don’t use video plan to start in the near future, according to HubSpot’s The State of Video Marketing in 2018.
Marketers should know better than anyone how effective a tool video can be. Not only are they using it to promote their own products, but 97 percent of marketers said they’ve watched videos to understand a product or service better.
So, in this edition of the Content Marketing Weekly, we’re going to press play on everything new in video this week.
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The Big Lie Behind the “Pivot to Video”
A recent lawsuit opened new wounds for advertisers, journalists and other professionals working in media. The phrase “pivot to video” refers to a 2015 claim by Facebook that more people are watching video as their interest in editorial and imagery faded. Facebook was excited to advise the world to focus heavily on video, because that was the way of the future.
It turned out, though, that Facebook had done its math wrong. One particularly poignant statistic showed the average duration of video viewed was increasing, but the company didn’t include views shorter than three seconds in its calculations. As a result, the announced average was much higher than the true average. Many people were ignoring videos on their news feeds or scrolling past them after one or two seconds.
This small mathematical mistake led to major consequences in many organizations. Writers and editors at publications such as Mashable, Vice and others lost their jobs to make way for more video professionals, Slate reported.
As harmful as Facebook’s mistake (and subsequent cover-up) was, there’s a lesson to be learned here: Everyone’s audience is different. While it’s important to pay attention to leading media companies and the insight they have privilege to, it’s also critical to have your finger on the pulse of your own audience. Maybe your customers prefer video more than the average person — maybe they don’t. When you can identify these trends through your own research and analytics, you can make intelligent marketing decisions.
Read more about this lawsuit on Slate.
LinkedIn Company Pages Can Now Publish Video Content Directly from Vimeo
Despite Facebook’s counting error, there really is a trend toward video. This fact inspired a collaboration between two popular platforms: LinkedIn and Vimeo, Search Engine Journal reported. This is LinkedIn’s first complete integration with a video platform.
A new “Publish to Social” feature on the Vimeo lets users publish their video directly to their LinkedIn page.
Via vimeo.com.
“Video has become one of the key drivers for member engagement on LinkedIn…,” said Peter Roybal, principal product manager at LinkedIn, according to Search Engine Journal. “Our new integration with Vimeo is an exciting step for anyone who wants to gain more exposure, and understand their reach to LinkedIn’s highly-engaged professional audiences.”
The update will also give users access to statistics related to viewership and overall video performance from LinkedIn and other social networks.
Marketers who love video should be excited for this update, as this will make it easier to disperse Vimeo videos across many platforms and provide them a wealth of statistics all in one place.
YouTube Now Counts ‘Engagement’ for YouTube for Action Ads at 10 Seconds, Not 30
TrueView for action ads is a YouTube feature designed for performance advertisers. The feature tracks certain statistics to give marketers deeper insight into the effectiveness of their video ads. Up until now, those statistics included:
- Engagements, which were counted when a viewer watched at least 30 seconds.
- Conversions, which were counted when a watcher takes action within 30 days of watching.
YouTube announced it would change both of these metrics, decreasing the minimum time for an engagement to 10 seconds and the timeframe to count a conversion to three days. Users can change the conversion timeframe if they wish, but they’ll have to do so through a Google rep, Marketing Land reported.
YouTube explained that these changes will reflect the way video ads impact conversions more accurately and in line with actual consumer behavior.
Read more about the changes to TrueView here.
The 15 Best Video Editing Apps for 2018
Before you can take advantage of YouTube’s new engagement metrics or Vimeo’s easy “Publish to Social” feature or, yes, even Facebook’s video sharing capabilities, you need one thing.
A video.
Luckily, there are plenty of resources out there to get you started creating video content for your social channels and beyond. HubSpot’s compilation of the best video editing apps highlights some simple-to-use tools that are available on a wide range of systems including iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux.
The best news? They all have free versions (except HitFilm, which is $99).
Check out the 15 best video editing apps here.
And, that’s a wrap! Check back next week for more content marketing news.
