5 Reasons Your Social Media Marketing Strategy Needs Video

If you’re not using video marketing on social media yet, there’s no time like the present to get started. Video is an effective tool for driving brand awareness, engagement, traffic, and sales—all components of a strong social media marketing strategy.

Why your business needs social media video marketing

In this post, we’ll break down five reasons why the time is now to start using video on social media—and show you how easy it is to dive in. Here we go!

1. Social Media Video Marketing Drives Sales

We thought we’d start with something we know will grab your attention: of marketers surveyed in our 2018 State of Social Video report, a whopping 93% said they got a new customer thanks to a video on social media.

And that’s not all. The survey showed that 88% of marketers are satisfied with the return on investment (ROI) of their social video marketing efforts and 80% feel good about the ROI of the video ads they’re posting on social media.

If that’s not a raving review for social media video marketing, we don’t know what is!

2. Video goes further than other types of content

In addition to driving sales, video has also been shown to drive more engagement, including shares, than other types of content like text and photos. And this trend has been reported across multiple social networks. Here are a few stats:

• According to a report from quintly, “Video is the content type that tends to spark the most engagement on Instagram.”
• Twitter reports that tweets with video are 6X more likely to be retweeted than tweets with photos and 3X more likely to be retweeted than tweets with GIFs.
• According to LinkedIn data, videos are shared 20X more often than other types of content in the LinkedIn feed.
• Facebook native videos get further reach than other types of content, and that’s not all. Over 100 million hours of video are watched every day on the social network.
• According to Facebook, people are gazing 5X longer at video content than at static content on Facebook and Instagram.

3. Video builds trust and personal connections

Video also provides businesses with a unique opportunity to foster trust and personal relationships. Video allows you to give a look behind the scenes to show the people behind the business, or to share social proof through customer testimonials.

In an article on video marketing trends to look out for in 2019, Animoto’s Chief Video Officer Jason Hsiao shared that, “Over the past year, it’s become more difficult for brands to earn consumers’ trust online. As a result, they’ve had to become more genuine and connect with people on a more personal level.”

The medium of video has an authenticity to it that lends itself well to content that fosters trust. Here at Animoto, we regularly put our team in front of the camera to speak directly to our customers. We’re here to share our expertise and help our customers be successful, and that’s much easier to get across in video than in text or images. Here’s an example from our 2018 Brand Camp event.

4. Your competitors are marketing with video

… and if they aren’t yet, they will be soon! It’s true. Each year more and more businesses are jumping on the social media video marketing bandwagon, reaping the benefits. And if they haven’t started yet, your competitors may be next.

Not sure if your competition is using video? Take a moment to do a little research. Check out their profiles on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or wherever they are on social media. If they are using video, what are they doing well? What could you do to differentiate yourself from them with your own social videos?

5. Consumers prefer video

If you’re not onboard with social media video marketing yet, this last little tidbit is sure to do the trick. According to our 2018 consumer survey, video is consumers’ #1 favorite type of content to see from brands.

Getting started with social media video marketing

The good news is? It’s not as difficult as you may think to get started with video for social media. Here at Animoto, we’ve taken the work out of social video creation, making it easy for you to create your first video in minutes.

With customizable video templates, designed with social video success in mind, you can create your own videos in minutes. With over a decade in the industry and partnerships with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn, Animoto is used by more than 1 million businesses worldwide.