What makes a good branded video?
According to statistics from research firm comScore, 42 per cent of all time spent online includes exposure to online videos with 6.65 billion videos having been viewed in September 2010 by 35.1 million viewers in the UK.
These figures can’t be ignored by any brand setting up a social media page, as it must consider the type of content its “friends” or “followers” will want to share to help build its community. As Russell Goldsmith, digital and social media director at markettiers4dc, points out: “Social Media is about opinion and conversation and broadcast content provides the vehicle for discussion.” Goldsmith believes that video and audio are far more engaging than straight text. He quotes the Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB’s) study from June 2010, that showed that 42 per cent of its research sample check out videos that friends and family recommended on YouTube, and 34 per cent watch videos that friends share on their Facebook profiles.
Discussing examples of latest technologies you can use to make the most of broadcast in your social media campaign, Goldsmith says it is important to make branded content interactive, whether that be live or on-demand. He gives examples of this as producing live webTV shows where viewers can send in questions through the video player embedded in the wall of their Facebook pages, or through a channel on YouTube, where you can publicise your live event on the http://www.youtube.com/live page.
Explaining how to get viewers’ interest, Goldsmith advises: “One way to make on-demand video engaging is to encode it with LinkTo technology which enables viewers to click on interactive hotspots within the video to add featured items to shopping baskets or complete data collection forms to sign up for more information. This technology can again work within the wall of a Facebook page, meaning if someone shares it with their own friends, they can also interact with the video even if they have not ‘liked’ the original brand’s page where the video was posted, helping with the viral spread of the content. It also works within a custom channel on YouTube and links within the video can be geo-targeted to cater for YouTube’s global audience, meaning viewers from different countries can be directed to different retailers, for example, when they click on certain featured items.”
In terms of value for money, Goldsmith points out that after investing in video content, making it interactive is just a small percentage increase in the overall budget. Goldsmith says you can increase the ROI of the content by hundreds of per cent, “as proven by brands such as Jaeger, where there was an increase in basket size of people shopping through catwalk videos as opposed to from the standard pages on their website by 300 per cent.” Goldsmith adds that if you are encoding content yourself, then it’s possible to make a video interactive for as little as £50.
This type of software makes existing video, which a lot of brands have created, work so much harder: “More and more time is spent within social media environments and so it’s important for brands to drive as much of that viewing time to their own content so that they can engage directly with the consumer, in effect becoming the content provider and media owner themselves.
Asked to name an example of a brand effectively using interactive video content on YouTube, both in a live and on-demand environment, Goldsmith mentions Start-rite shoes. This brand has created a custom channel which includes a series of how-to guides to help parents learn how to measure their children’s feet and fit certain types of shoes, enabling them to click on the featured products for more information.
The brand is also using the channel to broadcast a series of live and interactive webTV panel shows called Mums Half Hour, where mums have the chance to log on together to discuss the issues that matter to them from breast-feeding to maternity rights, and from fashion to holidays. The launch show was fronted by actress Tamzin Outhwaite.
Start-rite has taken time to contact key mummy bloggers and bring them into the panel to help spread the word using their online influence. This means the YouTube channel is becoming one of genuine community by using interactive broadcast content rather than just being a repository of video.