By: Hillel Scheinfeld
eMarketer is calling 2015 the “prime time for social video” estimating that online video ad revenue will grow to $7.7 billion this year with year-over-year increases over 13.9 percent through 2018. This increase can be credited to a few factors, including the availability of new social video advertising solutions, as well as increased video consumption.
Consumers love interacting with content on social media — whether it’s sharing, tweeting, posting, or pinning — sharing content on social media means that consumers feel this content is resonating with them. When consumers share positive feedback with branded video, they’re giving that brand their personal seal of approval and spreading the word about its products or services to other members of their network.
Users are sharing more video content than ever before. Facebook recently reported that its users share 75 percent more videos globally on the platform than they did at this time last year, and US Facebook users share 94 percent more videos than they did in the same time period. It’s an interesting and impressive trend, but certainly not surprising.
Your New Social Video Advertising Checklist:
1. Leverage new targeting capabilities.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat all feel like natural places to share video ads, as they are channels that naturally express users’ interests. By sharing or liking a particular video, such action, even if not intended, is a type of endorsement or statement about the content. As a result, social networks are able to create a profile of our likes, opinions, interests and more based on these simple actions. 
Therefore, it makes sense that social networks are a prime location for advertisers to reach certain audiences where they spend a huge amount of time and are already posting and engaging with videos.
In order to increase the impact of the video, coupled with better targeting capabilities, networks like Facebook and others have rolled out new autoplay formats so brands may be able to increase the number of viewers, especially if the content is entertaining within the first 5-10 seconds. These first seconds are crucial for engaging consumers because as viewers become used to expecting this small preview, they are also less forgiving if it doesn’t immediately catch their eye. Research also has proven that people are less likely to watch an ad than personal content from someone in their network, so those first seconds must be engaging enough to draw interest, but not too commercial to throw off the viewer.
This article was originally posted on VideoInk and is reposted on [a]listdaily via a partnership with the news publication, which is the online video industry’s go-to source for breaking news, features, and industry analysis. Follow VideoInk on Twitter @VideoInkNews, or subscribe via thevideoink.com for the latest news and stories, delivered right to your inbox.
