In our recent post titled The Ultimate Guide to Video Content Marketing, we explored the different types of video marketing content, their purposes, and how to create them. We also touched briefly on developing a video marketing strategy for your content and how to use it to market your brand.
So let’s say you’ve read the post and produced a great explainer video, showing your company's newest product — an amplified marketing platform, for example. It’s been decided in your marketing strategy that the goal of the video is to sell the product to a new audience and that you will promote it on social media platforms to do so.
The video is complete, and everyone in the office is high-fiving its quality and ingenuity, but then the social media manager asks, “Which platform(s) are we sharing this video on?” No one is sure.
We thought we’d help with Part 2 of the original post.
With social media at the forefront of marketing videos for business and one of the best places to get noticed by consumers, let's take a look at the major player’s platforms, including notable features for video, reach and market statistics, organic and paid posting capabilities, and the types of videos to post on each platform.
There are several online platforms on which to promote your marketing videos. We’ve compiled information on each of them to help you make your decision.
Nowhere is the importance of video content on display more than, YouTube, the largest video-hosting platform in the world and essentially a search engine containing billions of hours of content. On YouTube, businesses can create channels for video advertising to help them reach new audiences, promote products (or the company itself), build a customer base, and increase sales.
Similar in a sense to B2B podcasts, YouTube is also an educational platform. By making educational, explainer and demonstrational videos, a brand can develop a following as a thought leader — the first step in developing trust with potential customers.
YouTube is a free platform which also contains a variety of paid advertising strategies for sophisticated targeting called YouTube Advertising. To use this feature, you must set up a channel for your business, create your video ad, and set up your campaign. While setting up your campaign, you get to choose your objective, target audience, ad copy, budget, and more. YouTube Advertising also offers analytics, which makes it easy to measure your campaign’s results.
Explainer, educational and instructional or demonstration videos all perform particularly well on YouTube.
Twitter is a social media platform on which businesses can share their views, comments, and videos with their audiences within a 280-character limit. It is a popular medium for news organizations because of its capacity to quickly provide real-time information.
Twitter helps to raise brand awareness, engage with customers and potential customers in real time, drive traffic to your website, build customer trust as a thought leader, and develop a community of like-minded people.
Twitter has historically been a free social networking site. However, with the recent purchase by Elon Musk, there is uncertainty regarding how the platform will be managed going forward.
Currently, there is Twitter Ad Campaign — a paid advertising tool on which you can promote your video. Paid ads are exposed to a predetermined broad target audience for increased visibility. Ad Campaign’s features include: inputting your objective (reach, engagement, followers, or website traffic), selecting your target audience, creating your ad with a short caption and video, adding your website’s URL, and then setting your desired budget.
It’s important to note that Twitter ads use an auction, where advertisers bid against each other to have their ads shown to the audience they're targeting. In addition to your bid, Twitter also places importance on the quality of the ad. So, as we’ve said many times, start by creating quality content in the first place!
Brand and FAQ videos perform well as people often look to Twitter for informative content. Twitter is also a great place to post newsworthy videos or videos on trending topics.
If you want to market to professionals, LinkedIn is the platform of choice. It is a social networking platform made to connect with like-minded business professionals, share content, and apply and recruit for jobs. It is also a great platform for sharing B2B video content.
LinkedIn allows users to create a business account on which they can post videos for free. They also offer paid advertising with LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager. With this feature, you can title your campaign, create a campaign group (by project, location or budget), and then set up your campaign. LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager lets you set the campaign objective, target audience, ad format and placement, budget, and schedule. They also have a tool to track your conversions based on your campaign’s objectives.
LinkedIn is another great place for brand, behind-the-scenes, and educational videos.
Facebook is a social networking site that was designed to make connecting and sharing online with family and friends easy. Today, it is the world’s largest social network with capabilities such as selling products, hosting 360-degree videos, business advertising, and more.
Facebook users can create a business account on which they can post videos for free. Or, businesses can pay to advertise their content with Facebook’s Ad Manager. Ad Manager is an all-in-one tool for creating ads in which you can set target demographics, manage when and where the ads will run, and also track how well your campaigns are performing against your marketing goals.
Brand, behind-the-scenes, explainer, and product videos and testimonials all perform well on Facebook.
Instagram is a photo- and video-sharing social networking service owned by the American company called Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with pre-approved followers.
Instagram allows you to create a free business account and post video content organically.
They also offer a paid advertising tool called Instagram Ads (or Meta Ad Manager). On Ad Manager, you can name your campaign, select the objective, include special ad categories, enter campaign details such as buying type and spending limit, select specific audiences such as country, language, age, and gender, and even go as far as performing A/B testing on your ads.
Brand, behind-the-scenes, explainer, and product videos are successful on Instagram. Q&A or FAQ videos also perform well on Instagram Live.
TikTok is a social media app centered around short videos (5 to 120 seconds in length). TikTok advertisers can show their brand and products in action in a short video clip. While this format may be challenging for B2B brands that sell more complicated services, it’s ideal for B2C brands that want to move away from static ads and share engaging content.
TikTok allows users to create an account and share videos for free, however, they also have a paid platform called TikTok Ad Manager. Ad Manager has many ways to advertise ranging from ads that appear among the native newsfeed to ads that include up to 10 images and appear in TikTok’s newsfeed apps.
On Ad Manager, you will be able to create a new campaign, set a specific objective, and input your budget. You can also create ad groups on which you can create promotional goals, define your target audience, add a campaign budget, and add specific ad placements before creating your ad.
TikTok also provides native analytics to measure your ad’s performance.
Brand, behind-the-scenes, explainer, educational, product, and explainer videos all do well here.
Using social media to advertise your video is a surefire way to reach a large audience no matter what your budget is with both paid and organic strategies. Integrating both into your social strategy will help to keep existing followers engaged while reaching new audiences.
Understanding the best platform or combination of platforms for your video content marketing is a crucial piece of the B2B content marketing puzzle.
For more on how Casted can help your video marketing effectively reach your audience and drive demand, request a demo.