Video content has placed itself on the throne of the great engagement magnet of social media. Today, if you don’t use video on your page, you are done. However, do we even know what sort of videos we should publish? Thanks to the research conducted by Newswhip we can now know what kind of content has more success among users of different platforms.
The difference is in the content
First, we have the case of Insider. On its birth, it was entirely dedicated to silent 45-second videos and now they are using videos of 3 minutes or more with episodic content that can reach to 8 minutes, which they claim has been a great success. looking at the analisis, we can notice that from every Insider channel, Facebook Watch is the one that has generated much more engagement than normal posts, this is all thanks to the focus on videos with quality content in a bigger format that pulls users.
Viral brands and their times
Making viral organic content is one of the most difficult things you can try to do, at least planned, accidentally going viral is something quite different. In the case of viral posts, the study was conducted on: Ladbible, 5-min crafts, Buzzfeed, Cheddar and Tasty. The research tells us that content that goes beyond 3 minuts on Youtube is the most seen, which changes naturally on the other networks; leaving Facebook and Twitter above 2 minutes and minute and a half respectively. Another determining factor on the graph is content, the account could have a lot of engagement on videos with more or less duration depending a lot on their content. This would be the case of 5-min crafts which, evidently, has 5 minute videos.
The brands won’t get left behind
Conducting a study that investigates EVERY brand would be something far from easy, so in this case study Newswhip took one brand for every industry including: tech, fashion, automobile, toys and finance. Even though they are very different from one another, their content times don’t vary as much as viral brands, keeping times in YouTube around the 2 minute mark, Facebook and Twitter did the same around the minute and a half mark across every brand. Something interesting to note is that YouTube videos from Lego (toys) are much longer by leaning on episodic content, while Netflix cross-posts its own content through every platform, which is not wrong for this specific case, given that they make behind the scenes content and trailers that are useful for every user across the web.
The moral of the story
Number 1, the audience doesn’t have as little attention span as we thought, it is viable to use content that is longer and even more if it’s episodic, be it an entertainment show or news. Number 2, we must keep in mind our target audience at all times and our brand voice, even though regularly it’s not suggested to cross-post across our pages, some content can be used to generate a better remembrance rate. Finally, number 3, the general rule of YouTube video is that it has to be much longer than other platforms, but at the same time you have to post less than Facebook or Twitter. Of course, all these rules can be broken depending on user behavior and your brand.
Sources
www.newswhip.com
www.digiday.com