16/04/2016
Video Marketing

An introduction to social media video adverts

Having looked at free ways to share videos in a previous blog, I thought this would be a good opportunity to look at the next step in video promotion, social media video ads. These are a great way to get your videos playing in front of people but they must be instantly engaging and cause an emotional response if they are to do well. After all, no one is interested in boring videos and you don’t want to be paying to promote a video that is unlikely to perform.

Lets start off by defining what a video ad is – A video ad is a video that is promoted (for a fee) on a social media platform. It is played at the beginning of another video or on someones timeline and pops up based on various targeting criteria that the marketer chooses.

Lets look at the main three – YouTube, Facebook and Twitter

search video adYouTube

YouTube is the most popular video sharing site with over 400 hours of content uploaded every minute. This means it can be a lot of work to get beside videoyour videos listed organically and to increase the view count. A video ad on YouTube is played before another video, they are listed at the top of the search results (right) and they also appear beside playing videos (above left). YouTube operates a pay-per-view pricing plan so if a viewer skips the video you will pay nothing and what’s more you can set your own daily budgets enabling you to keep full control of your expenditure. YouTube offers a range of targeting options so you can ensure your video appears in front of the right customers, these include age, gender, location, interests and re-marketing to name just a handful. You will also have access to YouTube’s analytics system so you can keep track of how your videos are performing and make tweaks along the way.

The fantastic thing about using video ads on YouTube is that hopefully your views and channel subscribers will increase. This means YouTube will take more notice of you, and your videos will start appearing more and more in the organic results meaning you won’t need to use video ads for every video you upload. For further reading on this visit YouTube’s advertising pages –https://www.youtube.com/intl/en-GB/yt/advertise/.

Facebook

Video ads are fairly new to Facebook but they can pack a punch if you have a great video because over a billion people log onto Facebook every day, now that’s quite a potential audience! If you upload a video to Facebook rather than linking to it, your video will automatically play when it appears on a customers timeline, this in itself is a powerful tool but with Facebook video ads you can take your video marketing one step further. When you share a video on Facebook it will only appear once unless you post it multiple times, with video ads Facebook will post your video automatically based on what budget and frequency you set when you set up the video ad campaign. Facebook charges based on impressions or views and you will be charged once someone views the first 10 seconds of the video or 97% of the run time if the video is under 10 seconds long. Facebook’s targeting options are very powerful, allowing you to select interests, behaviours, location, age and gender. Facebook also gives you an analytics tool so you can keep track of exactly how each of your video ads is performing. For further reading take a look at Facebook’s video advert pages – https://www.facebook.com/business/ads-guide/video/facebook-feed/video-views.

Twitter

Twitter works in very much the same way as Facebook in that your video will play automatically when a user scrolls past it on their timeline. You can set similar targeting options to both Facebook and YouTube including, location, devices, age, gender, keywords that appear either in tweets or in search terms and interests. You will be charged after a video has played for 3 seconds if it’s in full view on the users screen or if they select the video to watch in full screen. All other interactions such as replies and retweets are free.

I hope this has helped to show how important these platforms can be in video marketing and social media marketing campaigns. If you would like to discuss your next video for a social media marketing campaign please call Will or Andy on 01273 911 345 or email info@echovideo.co.uk.

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