For a small-ish business, marketing that you can pull together with just a phone and a spare minute is such a coup.
Maybe you don’t feel up to making miniature product ads but you can certainly use video for content marketing, the feel-good brand knowledge stuff that’s going to get people engaging with you.
Social video has seen a huge rise in popularity since Instagram launched their own video function in competition with Vine.
Personally, I think this has something to do with privacy. On your mobile, whatever you’re watching is just for you because it’s in your hand, right in your face. I reckon that makes people much more willing to click and pass a few seconds to be amused.
It’s also about boredom: we turn to our phones instinctively when there’s a lull, and those short social video clips are the perfect diversion.
1. All you need is a phone
Because it’s so easy and costs nothing, it doesn’t matter if you make a few videos and think they’re pants. As you get into the habit of making small clips of your colleagues, days out, your products and general company activity, your practice will pay off.
2. It takes seconds – literally
Six seconds (Vine) or 15 seconds (Instagram) is not very long – but that’s good. For a start, you don’t have time or equipment to be making a super fancy company video (you can leave that to the Yell video team) and the time constraint actually has one very powerful side-effect: spontaneity.
Just like a haiku is beautiful for its simplicity and fragility, so your Vines and Instagrams can be an effective part of your content marketing.
3. It’s personal
It’s been easy to make short video clips for a long time now. My first digital camera was a clunky 5-megapixel Sony Cybershot that took 10-second video clips. I lugged it everywhere and still have the vast collection of silly and touching videos. Within a few years, those 10-second clips were so old fashioned it was laughable. And now they’re back.
This feeling – the nostalgic feeling of making something intimate to share with your friends – translates very well to the social internet. Video feels friendly. Put your brand’s heart out there – show people you’re real and have a personality.
4. Videos are easy to share
The great thing about making social videos is that they’ll get you engagement on the platform you used, but you’ll also get mileage out of them elsewhere.
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Instagram and YouTube are owned by Facebook – so videos you put there are easily shared on Facebook. Vine is owned by Twitter, so it’s easily shared to Twitter. According to Econsultancy, Facebook in particular has a nasty tendency to shove Vines down people’s newsfeeds, so they don’t get seen.
So if you favour a particular social media platform for most of your activity, choose the video platform that’s going to complement it.
5. The audience is massive
If none of the above is enough to persuade you, think about this: Instagram gets 300 million active users every months, Vine gets 40 million and YouTube knocks it out of the park with well over a billion monthly users. Aside from the huge numbers, engagement is also higher on these platforms – the average Instagram post has more than three times more engagement than the average tweet.
For something that takes so little time and budget, short video clips are a super easy way to generate more content and the grass-roots feel is all part of the game.
Like the sound of all that engagement? Read my post on cool ways to show off your business with Instagram.
[bctt tweet=”Social video is the perfect SME marketing – quick, cheap and personal. “]
