3 Ways to Boost Video Shares Online
To guarantee sharing success, be sure to make powerful content, revisit popular concepts, and seed your video well.
To guarantee sharing success, be sure to make powerful content, revisit popular concepts, and seed your video well.
It’s one of the most important rules of digital marketing: content can’t thrive online unless it’s shared. Regardless of how excellent and culturally relevant your visual or informational content might be, it’s dead in the water unless it manages to get some traction through social shares.
The good news is that consumers are predisposed to share. Better still – particularly in this age of Vine and Instagram Video – is the knowledge that they’re particularly willing to share content that comes in video form. A new report from video technology company Unruly has found that online video ad sharing grew by 7 percent in the second quarter of this year, with the most gains seen in the entertainment, consumer-packaged goods (CPG), technology, retail, and automotive categories. Videos in the entertainment vertical alone generated more than 11 million shares, while CPG owned two of the 20 most-shared videos to date: Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches,” and Evian’s “Baby & Me.”
As was reported earlier this year, though, shares alone aren’t quite enough. If content is going to attract a lot of eyeballs, it has to have momentum from the start. Typically, a quarter of all branded online video shares take place within the first three days of campaign launch. The “high point” for video sharing was found to be the second day after a video has gone live.
“Shares are an extremely important metric to track, as this is where brands earn ROI,” says Devra Prywes, VP of marketing and insights with Unruly U.S. “A share…creates the advocacy and e-word-of-mouth that drives 20 to 50 percent of purchase decisions.”
It sounds easy enough: all a brand needs to do is to produce content consumers can’t resist sharing immediately, and that generates purchase-making word-of-mouth. In fact, marketers continue to pursue the elusive prescription for creating a winning viral video. While there’s no goof-proof formula to guaranteeing sharing success, there are several guidelines that will help. Follow these and you’re likely to see your own branded video shares grow.