by Lennie Appelquist
Social media marketing, integrated with video is not only a ‘next generation’ way of engaging business, it is business engagement on steroids. There are very special advantages to combining social media marketing strategies with video, and this concept and methodology has fast become a vital part of social technology – thought to be even more important than text.
Marketing professionals today are seeing more and more social content coming at us from even more sources. By sources we are referring to channels such as popular business and social networks. Examples of these are well known to us all – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube – these are only the famous few.
This increase in content places massive demands on business as the pace becomes faster than ever; there is only one opening left to business in circumstances such as these – if you can beat ‘em, then join ‘em. This sees mainstream industry just as anxious to be ‘social’, and participate on this level.
Let’s unpack this a little further; as business are expected to engage with conversations which pop up around what they do, they have to cut through a great deal of noise to reach their target market. So, there is ever increasing competition to attract attention. This means the bar has been raised to dictate what will catch the attention of their audience. They have to give them what they want, and the audience wants video. What was once dismissed as a form of online entertainment that had nothing to do with serious advertising – for example YouTube videos- is now being seen by business as a serious marketing tool.
With advancements in technology, audience participation and familiarity, the social video platform has become a marketing platform for business. The channel integrates easily with all other business properties – by this we mean websites and blogs – and is also fully integrated across all social network brands. Online video is no longer purely a YouTube domain; it is an easily integrated social technology which a growing percentage of internet users have come to expect.
Customers now think it strange if a business does not have video content appearing on their websites. Social media marketing in the form of video for business also needs to be specifically ‘social’ video; but why? The differentiators is that social video content is defined by continual interaction. That is between the video content and the people or consumers who watch. This has a persuasive action, which either benefits the business – or not.
Video is therefore considered to be ‘naturally’ social; whereas a purely informative website together with its target audience offers an interaction, but is not actually fostering a social interaction. Let’s look at this a little more deeply.
Many websites today feature ‘social’ functions such as comments sections, forums, support communities or all of these features combined. This is an example of a similar interaction, with valuable marketing potential, but it still won’t have the same impact as social video. The fact that two or more people curate information or data and then purposefully share the data, is what makes it interactive or ‘social’ if you prefer, and video has a tendency to do this naturally.
The technology is more readily available and easier than ever before to use, so there is no viable excuse for any business not to use social media marketing to engage their audience, and get their business engagement on steroids. It is very important to remember here that humans are ‘visual’ beings.
