Social Videos and Social Video Marketing

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Using the social network to generate interest in your product or service has become nearly universal today. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have responded to this with enhanced business pages and feeds. YouTube as well has embraced the business model for social networking. As a result of this newfound love for promoting your business on the social network, social videos have become the hot new tool for doing so.

However, the question must be asked, “What are social videos and why are they so popular?” Well, stated simply, using social videos is the attempt to attract attention to your product or service organically. That is to say, free.

Social Video Marketing

By generating interest, along with “shares” of your video over the social network, you can create interest in your business, product, or service without incurring the usual advertising costs. Plus, your social video marketing efforts are directed to a highly targeted, motivated audience of people who enjoy sharing new and different information with their friends. What more could an advertiser ask for?

Social Videos and an Emotional Response

But why call them “social” videos? Because in this case, your videos are directed specifically at the social network, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and others; the places where your viewers are most likely to share, and where “going viral” is most possible.

Video is by far the most effective medium for generating an emotional response from your audience, the very response you seek in advertising. The social network is the most effective medium for sharing emotional responses. By blending the two, social videos and the social network, you give yourself the greatest chance of reaching a vast, yet targeted audience.

Video is inherently social

 The social network enhances this because of the compulsion of its users to share the things which generate an emotional response in them. They will:

• Share Emotions – The things which appeal to them most powerfully are the things they will share.
• Share Identity – The things with which they identify, and which help to identify them, are the things they will share.
• Share Self Expression – The things which help them to express emotions they cannot express themselves are the things they will share.
• Share Information – Information which they find valuable are the things they will share.
• Share Reciprocity – When sharing, they will expect others to share back to them.

Sharing Social Videos

• Users are more engaged with friend-endorsed content; and people heavily share videos they find interesting with friends.
• Video engagement drives purchase intent. People who watch a video are more likely to purchase what is being offered than something without any video.
• Word-of-mouth: Over 81% of users search internet word-of-mouth when making purchasing decisions; and video reviews are becoming more prevalent in being found in search engine results, along with ease-of-sharing.
• Growing views: The Internet measurement firm Visible Measures reported social video ad campaigns generated more than 2.7 billion views in 2010, up from 820 million in 2009.
• Increased investment: “YouTube has a sponsored videos marketing that’s doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue,” says Dan (Greenberg of Sharethrough). “We now have agencies that work in our space that are created specifically for branded content; i.e., they simply create the content, and not to do the media buying or distribution technology. If you count the creative agencies and ad agencies and publishers who are dedicated to this space, I’d say it’s already a billion-dollar market and growing.”

(Source: The Rise of Social Video Advertising & Why You Should Care http://www.reelseo.com/social-video-advertising/#ixzz1gYJaaF4J ©2008-2011 ReelSEO.com Online Video Guide)

Social Videos and Branding

Once your video has been shared by a growing audience, you will begin to gain an identity, a brand. You will begin to become known as “That guy who…,” or “The company that…,” or “The woman who did…,” the thing that everyone is sharing, and talking about. You definitely want to be that guy, that company, or that woman – and social videos will help you accomplish this.

Use social videos consistently – and consistently include your identity, your brand, in every piece of content you produce, whether video, audio, imagery, or text. The payoff here is that soon it will be your brand which is being shared, not just your content. That is the Holy Grail of marketing and advertising. Wouldn’t you like to become the next “Kleenex,” which is the word everyone uses for facial tissue, despite the actual brand they’re using? Sure you would.

To accomplish this you must:

• Create Content, not advertisements.
• Generate Views, not impressions.
• Seek Shares, not clicks-throughs.

Change your thinking from the traditional advertising model, and the rest will take care of itself.

Your goal with social videos

Your goal with the use of social videos is to get consumers to embrace your video content as part of their social lives, and to share it with others on the social network. By understanding the need to share whatever content they find important, you can exploit this need to your advantage in your next social video marketing campaign. After all, if all of those social networkers out there are going to share information anyway, why shouldn’t it be yours?