This is Chez Jay in Santa Monica California – one of those rare places where the elephant in the room might actually
be an elephant.
For Marketers & Platforms: Video is The Elephant In The Room
In the first of a continuing series, we discuss why VIDEO has become the obsession of every for major social platform: Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter (and Twitter’s video pal: Vine). In subsequent entries, we’ll talk about how brands can optimize their ROV (return on video) for each platform -- both individually and collectively.
In January of 2015, Socialbakers published
“The Rise of Facebook Video.” Their opening sentence laid out the historical significance of the occasion in plain English: “it's official: instead of sharing YouTube videos, brands are now uploading more videos to Facebook directly.”
The article included the graph below -- and showed that this was a battle that took place throughout 2014, with the momentous “crossing” taking place in November:
Business Insider’s
“Facebook is Gobbling up Youtube’s Audience” was published right around the time Facebook took the lead. It’s loaded with additional data and perspective that makes it clear that this “crossing” didn’t happen by accident -- video had clearly become a strategic priority for Facebook -- maybe
the strategic priority.
And while it’s fun to follow some of the Spy vs Spy tactics of this battle, what you can see clearly when you elevate above the dust-up is something truly epic: all the social-platform elephants, realizing all at once that the really big elephant is the medium itself – VIDEO.
Not just Facebook & Youtube, but Twitter and Instagram are making the move to moving pictures too. That’s because the brands with the dollars are taking those dollars where the people/eyeballs/wallets are going, and they’re all pointing to VIDEO -- and by the way they’re also all pointing NORTH.
eMarketer put that Northward drift in a nutshell recently with the graph below. Note that black bars are total spend, redline is percentage growth (you can see that 2014’s spend-increase represented a dramatic catch-up):
Looking at Video for Social Creatively -- Platform by Platform
Our goal over the next several articles in this series is to look at this revolution from a creative, rather than a business (or investor’s) perspective -- and to look at each of the major social sites individually. We’ll look at their history, ethos, user-populations, growth – and finally at how they enable you to manage, distribute, publicize and/or archive your branded videos.
We’ll be doing all of that with a creative lens -- talking about the creative strategies that have emerged on each platform to optimize your results.
And – watch out, here comes the meta -- we’ll be talking about how you can be creative with your creative too.
First platform up is the newly crowned champ – Facebook. Stay tuned and we’ll update our status here in a couple weeks.
