Why Your Dealership Needs to Utilise Video on Social Media

As social media continues to dominate the focus of many marketing strategies, now is the perfect time to review what type of content works best for each platform.

Modern day marketing is a battle of attaining attention. Therefore, brands need to focus their efforts where the majority of audiences are today and will likely be in the next 12 months.

Video’s Dominance in Social Media

If you use social media, you may have already realised how important video is due to the amount of it you see on the platforms. Here are the latest statistics that show the dominance that this content holds in the social media world:

• Facebook – Around 500 million people watch videos on Facebook every day.
• Twitter – 82% of Twitter’s user base watches video content.
• YouTube – Over 5 billion video views a day.
• Snapchat – Generates 10 billion video views a day.

YouTube

More video is consumed on YouTube than any other social media platform. A staggering 1 billion hours of video is watched daily on YouTube in 88 countries in 76 languages! YouTube is also the world’s second largest search engine, after Google, of course. Another great statistic backing the platform is that out of the 87% of marketers who have published video content on the platform, a whopping 90% found it to be effective.

Facebook

As you may know, from Facebook itself or our other social media blogs, the platform has made a lot of changes to its algorithms recently. These changes include the shift in importance of video compared to other content and the organic reach this content provides. This has caused marketers to produce more video and, ultimately, more users to watch it, with around 100 million hours of clips watched daily on the platform. Here’s what you need to know to increase your presence on Facebook:

• To attract high engagement, use humorous or informative videos.
• Utilise Live videos. When doing this, ensure you go live at a time when the majority of your followers are going to be active on the platform. Put extra effort into the first 5 seconds of the clip to capture the interest of the viewer.
• Keep videos around 1-3 minutes long to keep the viewer’s attention.
• Writing compelling copy for the captions to encourage more people to click and watch.
• Use subtitles! 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound.

Instagram

Instagram boasts an incredible base of 500 million users that are active on the platform daily. Many brands are actively using Instagram after noticing the power of the platform after its acquisition by Facebook. On Instagram, your video length is limited to just 60 seconds, so you have to ensure that you grab the user’s attention and retain them for a whole minute.

Instagram Stories

Instagram stories are great for documenting your brand and promoting a product or service within a 10 second photo or video. Stories last for 24 hours and then they reside to your ‘stories archive’ where you can highlight them within the bio of your Instagram profile page. If your account has over 10,000 followers, stories can be a great tool to drive traffic to a landing page through the ‘swipe up’ feature you receive after passing this milestone.

Twitter Videos

Twitter is a real-time news based social media platform, therefore it’s a great platform to share video content. Organic Twitter videos gain an average of 2.5x more replies, 1.9x more favourites and 2.8x more retweets than third-party videos shared on the social network.

Twitter’s feed has the fastest scroll, so it is essential that brands focus on eye-catching content to gain the user’s attention. When using Twitter for videos, it’s important to remember the following:

• Ideal length of the video should be 30-60 seconds.
• Ideal aspect ratio should be 2.39:1.
• Ensure a mobile-first approach is taken as 90% of videos are watched on smartphones.
• Focus on branding.

Conclusion

It has become clear that in 2018 video marketing is the best way to create engagement on social media, although, 87% of marketers say that they plan to use video in their marketing strategies this year. Therefore, you have to ensure you win the battle for attention over other brands. Integrate your own strategies, try various tools and keep experimenting. But overall, keep posting video!

To talk with Ronnie about the social media services Click Dealer offers its dealership clients and how we can help improve your engagement, reach, brand recognition and social leads, get in touch today via marketing@clickdealer.co.uk , 01782 478220 or via our contact page.