Twitter’s Foray Into Video and the Visual Web

As Twitter moves into video, following Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, here is what it means for marketers.

Twitter has announced it is getting into video. Since August it was rumored that Twitter had been actively working on building up its built-in video system, which it plans to release in the coming weeks.

This feature will allow users to shoot, edit, and post video they take directly through their Twitter app. For brands, here’s how the video product will work:

  • Advertisers can create a six-second video preview that will be served as the autoplay feature
  • Brands can take the best six seconds of their video. It does not have to be only the first six seconds
  • Twitter’s autoplay feature will not be audio-enabled. A user has to first click the promoted tweet to start
  • Advertisers will have up to 10 minutes of video time to show and promote their content

Prior to this news, the only video play Twitter had was through its 2012 acquisition of Vine, the short-form video sharing service. Vine has been an absolute smash hit for Twitter. It was crowned the fastest-growing app of 2013 at around 403 percent, according to a study by Global Web Index, and has been the preferred video platform particularly among younger audiences.

Vine’s user base is hovering around 40 million, with more than 100 million watching Vine videos monthly. With Twitter’s foray into video, it’s clear that it is trying to capture the ever-growing online video market, which has been one of the major breakout areas of the past year.

According to eMarketer, the U.S. audience for digital video will surpass 200 million in 2015, more than half the entire population. Of this audience, they will spend 15.9 percent of each day’s media time viewing digital video across smartphones, tablets, and desktop.

In Asia, this figure is even greater, with China alone tracking around 34 percent of daily time in online video.

Clearly Twitter is taking clues from Facebook, which has been super successful in video, stating that users within its network are watching more than 1 billion video clips daily. And according to a new post, Facebook states that in just one year, the number of video posts per person has increased a whopping 75 percent globally and 94 percent in the U.S.

Video has become an increasingly important part of social media and social sharing. Instagram got into video back in 2012, as did Snapchat and Pinterest during the same year. I think this is in some part a reaction to this movement of the “visual Web.” Platforms like Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, and others have all fueled the visual Web, which could be in part a response to how users behave and react to the influx of content being added, uploaded and shared on the Web.

A great example of this is the site One Second on the Internet, which visualizes all the content being put online every second.

One could argue that the future of communication lies in visuals. It represents a break from text-heavy online experiences to ones that now focus on visuals as the core anchor or central theme of the website.

In large part, smartphones and tablets have trained us to be more visual learners as these devices simply force us to have better and more usable experiences with this type of content, rather than squinting at tiny lines of text. And because of this change in viewing behavior, companies like Twitter are adapting their business models and evolving their platforms to simply become more visual, digestible, and dynamic.

Humans process images 60,000 times faster than text. So go figure, these platforms are evolving more into video-based networks. Only time will tell which ones win. What we do know is that all these platforms are massively challenging YouTube, who has always been the king of video. But this king might soon be dethroned.

Image via Shutterstock.

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