According to a new study by Demand Metric and Vidyard, more than 90 percent of marketers said that video content is becoming more important. A recent Cisco study predicts that consumer consumption of video will constitute 80 percent of all global internet traffic by 2019. Marketers know that video should be part of the strategy, but which platforms are best? Let’s break it down.
YouTube
- Currently the top video streaming site in the world and second most popular website overall according to Alexa, YouTube hosts over 1 billion users, 1.7 million of which are from the US.
- Global popularity can be attributed to no less than 88 local versions and being able to navigate YouTube in 76 different languages, covering 95 percent of the population.
- Each month, users watch 3.25 billion hours of video and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube, generating billions of views, according to the site.
- More than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices.
- Fifty-one percent of marketers say that video is the type of content with the best ROI and YouTube remains the king of social video platforms, even with Facebook Live, Twitch, Periscope and even upstarts like YouNow and Live.me rising in popularity.
- YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18-to-34 and 18-to-49-year-olds than any cable network in the US.
“YouTube remains the top destination for teenagers, who also rate it the ‘coolest’ social platform and they trust the creators on it much more than they do traditional celebrities,” said Caroline Collins, director of social media for Ayzenberg in the fourth quarter Ayzenberg EMV Index. (Note: [a]listdaily is the publishing arm of Ayzenberg.)
- As of the third quarter of 2016, Facebook had 1.79 billion monthly active users.
- Over half of the US population will log on to Facebook at least once per month, according to predictions by eMarketer.
- Users watch 100 million hours of video per day on Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, and 500 million people watch Facebook video every day.
- People spend more than three times more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live, Facebook reported.
While the wildly popular social network claims to serve a staggering 8 billion video views per day, how accurate that is has come into question in light of recent miscalculations. Critics point out that a view is counted after three seconds on Facebook compared to 30 seconds on YouTube. Also, Facebook videos autoplay, leading to views being counted where, in many cases, the viewer wasn’t actually . . . you know, viewing.
Sketchy statistics aside, Facebook is the marketing elephant in the room—worth the investment for brands hoping to reach engaged consumers, particularly the young ones. “Facebook’s forays into video, particularly live video, have brought back younger audiences that have migrated to niche social apps,” says Erik Schmitt, a social media strategist at Ayzenberg. “Both the viewers and the creators are now coming back to Facebook.”
Twitch
- Over 9.7 million log on to watch streaming content—mostly game-related—every day.
- Those users go on to watch 106 minutes per person, per day.
- Twitch hosts over two million unique streamers per month.
- Seventy-five percent of its users are male, with 73 percent of them between the ages of 18-to-49.
- The site is a hub for influencer marketers—especially since over 17,000 thousand creators are part of the Twitch Partner Program to earn revenue for streams.
Twitch isn’t just for gamers, however. Brands are also turning to the platform to broadcast their own content, such as interactive scare sessions for Stranger Things and The Magnificent Seven. “We’re having tremendous success with non-endemic brands. The most significant shift we’ve seen is that gamers are now becoming an extremely attractive target,” Anthony Danzi, Twitch’s senior vice president of client strategy, told The Wall Street Journal.
- This Facebook-owned platform has over 600 million monthly active users.
- Instagram users share an average of 95 million photos and videos per day.
- The Pew Research found that more women actively use Instagram than men (31 percent versus 24 percent, respectively).
- A report from WebDam found that 60 percent of the top brands on Instagram use the same filter for every post.
- Fifty percent of Instagram users follow at least one business, 60 percent say that they learn about a product or service on the platform and 75 percent of Instagram users take action, such as visiting a website.
- Posts with at least one hashtag average 12.6 percent more engagement than those without, according to a study by Simply Measured.
- While hospitality brands have the largest median audience on Facebook, interaction across the vertical on Instagram is almost 20 times higher.
Thanks to a plethora of new offerings like Stories, live video, business profiles and eCommerce, consumers and brands alike are discovering even more ways to connect and share.
“Because businesses play such a rich role within our community, we’ve seen they are the profiles that have led the way and really innovated in [the Stories] space,” Jen Ronan, Instagram’s brand development lead, told The Drum. “They’re telling stories of behind the scenes, of the day to day, and really building their brand in that way.”
Twitter (via Periscope)
- Twitter hosts 317 million users, while Periscope reported 10 million within its first year.
- As of last March, over 200 million broadcasts have been created on Periscope and over 110 years of live video are watched every day on iOS and Android.
- A study by Research Now showed that 83 percent of Twitter users watch video content on the platform.
- Ninety percent of Twitter video views are done through mobile.
- Forty-one percent of Twitter users thought that the social site was a great place to discover videos.
- Twitter gamers are 1.25 times more likely to spend over $100 on video games per year, compared to non-Twitter gamers.
- Twitter users want to talk to you—82 percent of users interact with brands on Twitter.
The company announced the acquisition of Magic Pony Technology in June, a company that specializes in making novel machine learning techniques for visual processing. In addition to previous purchases, including Madbits (in July 2014) and Whetlab (in June 2015), this latest acquisition could build toward a bigger picture for Twitter’s future with video.
Snapchat
- The disappearing photo-and-video app has over 300 million users.
- Users upload over 100 million Snaps (photos) and videos each day.
- Snapchatters watch over 10 billion videos per day, which is more than a 350 percent increase in the last year alone.
- Vertical videos are watched nine times more than horizontal videos on Snapchat.
- In a survey conducted last year, roughly 44 percent of Snapchat users between the ages of 13-to-24 who said they had used Live Stories and/or Discover reported doing so on at least a daily basis.
- Snapchat reaches 41 percent of all 18-to-34-year-olds in the United States.
Once dedicated only to photo sharing, brands have taken marketing to a whole new level this past year with the first 360-degree video ad (Sony: Don’t Breathe). With the launch of video-capture Spectacles, Snapchat is poised to attract even more consumers and brand-created videos this year.
- With just about 150 million users, Pinterest makes up for numbers with engagement. In just five years, Pinterest has become the third most popular social network in the US, just behind Twitter and Facebook.
- Eighty-nine percent of daily users said they bought something on the site, while 86 percent have used the site in stores to find specific products.
- Pinterest drives more traffic to publishers than Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit combined.
With the introduction of native video, Pinterest has opened up opportunities for brands and creators, who get access to all the traditional metrics for video ads, as well as the option to stick featured pins below the video.
“In the last year alone, we’ve seen a 60 percent increase in videos on Pinterest,” product manager, Steve Davis said on the official Pinterest blog, “with workouts, home projects and hair and beauty tutorials topping the charts. With so many bloggers, brands and other experts using video to share their ideas, it’s more important than ever that the video experience be as seamless as possible, and we’ve got some big improvements in the works.”