Kind of a combination of two marketing tactics, video sharing can be an extremely important part of any digital marketers entire campaign. Video ads have grown in popularity and effectiveness greatly since they started actually being used, and social media marketing is today’s big ticket marketing method. So, if you sort of mush the two together, you essentially come out with YouTube. YouTube has been marketers’ go to place to use social video, as it often is the type of video marketing that sees satisfactory results. Recently, eMarketer has released some information that pertains to social video sharing, and here is their grand introduction to the results,
The power of social video represents an evolution in digital advertising, according to a new eMarketer report, “Social Video: The Next Wave in Digital Advertising.” Marketers are starting to move past the interruptive model of the 15- or 30-second pre-roll ad and toward a broader strategy that includes longer opt-in videos with built-in sharing capabilities. This branded content is designed to be consumed and shared on the social web, driving earned media and raising the potential for viral success.
Social video ad views for the entire globe have seen quite a substantial growth in 2012, as can be seen in eMarketer’s bar graph. The graph shows that in Q1 of 2011, there were 773.4 million social video ad views, while in Q1 of 2012, the number had skyrocketed to an astounding 1.32 billion.
Of the online video properties that marketers have shown interest in, YouTube sits at the very top, which should come as no surprise to anyone. However, what is interesting is that in August of 2012, YouTube had attracted up to 150.2 million unique viewers. At that time the site contained 13.77 billion videos, and the average time that viewers spent on the site for the month was a whopping 443.4 minutes. These statistics are what put the company at the top.
What I want to focus on here though, is that YouTube is a place where internet using consumers go to see videos, as well as share them. So, not only are a lot of people viewing these ads on YouTube but they are also sharing them, which is exactly what marketers look for when advertising with the Google owned video property. Of course, the numbers show that 72.2% of videos shared in the late summer of 2012 were shared on Facebook, with email coming in second place with only 8.5%.
Not many marketers see how important of a connection there is between Facebook and YouTube when using YouTube’s video advertising features. Since video sharing is now becoming a very important player in the video advertising world, it is good to see that it is on the up, and that Facebook is the place where consumers make it happen. Facebook users share things constantly on their Facebook pages, including these YouTube videos. Attached to these videos are YouTube ads, and every time a video is shared, so is the ad. Paying attention to this fact might help to bring in more video ad shares.
The full report from eMarketer is here.
