As the holiday season heats up, marketers have an awesome collection of content marketing options. We picked out our favorite video marketing tools that will help you create rich and engaging campaigns.
Instagram recently announced that it has an astounding 400 million monthly active users. This figure may pale in comparison with it’s parent company’s user-base but Instagram’s smaller group of users are much more likely to engage, and even share your content than Facebook users, relatively speaking. Instagram boasts an average engagement rate of 4.21% per follower, which is 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook. Couple that appealing engagement rate with great content creation and sharing options and you have a winner for visual brands.
Instagram has a number of features that encourage discoverability and sharing including hashtags which were popularized on Twitter (which Instagram has since surpassed in terms of user numbers). Instagram recently released a new app called Boomerang.
It’s not a photo. It’s not a gif. It’s a Boomerang.
Today, we’re announcing Boomerang from Instagram, a new video app that lets you turn everyday moments into something fun and unexpected.
Boomerang is simple app that takes a short burst of photos and stitches them together into a “high-quality mini video that plays forward and backward”. It builds on the popular success of animated GIFs which first started appearing on Tumblr and adds a twist:
Boomerang users can then share their videos on Instagram with their followers. Encourage your fans to create cool videos of their own featuring your brand and add a specific hashtag to their post descriptions so you can track them and share the best ones in your Instagram feed. Your fans will love the extra attention and being part of your brand’s holiday success story.
Pro tip: Instagram has also started testing multiple user logins on Android devices so it will become even easier to share cool stuff on the go without the hassle of logging out of your personal Instagram profile and into your brand’s and risk losing the moment.
Periscope
Have you ever wanted to see the world through someone else’s eyes? This is Periscope’s mission.
Just over a year ago, we became fascinated by the idea of discovering the world through someone else’s eyes. What if you could see through the eyes of a protester in Ukraine? Or watch the sunrise from a hot air balloon in Cappadocia? It may sound crazy, but we wanted to build the closest thing to teleportation. While there are many ways to discover events and places, we realized there is no better way to experience a place right now than through live video. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but live video can take you someplace and show you around.
Periscope is a relatively recent addition to the Twitter family and it is a simple app that enables you to start a live video stream on the go, with your mobile phone, with the option to tweet out a link to your Live Stream. Periscope also features, there’s an array of privacy settings, so one can choose to have their profile public, or private to certain users. Scopes captured can be LBB (Limited by Broadcaster), which just disables comments if you don’t have the resources to keep up with the inevitable flood of fan feedback.
You've shown us a lot in 9 weeks. This video is a small glimpse of what we've seen through your eyes. Thank you! 👊🙏https://t.co/5WCQyIRwMj
— Periscope (@periscopeco) June 5, 2015
Periscope has a great deal of potential for marketers and many brands have caught onto that. In fact, brands such as Target, BMW and Benefit have used Periscope for sneak-peaks of launching new products, or for the purpose of going behind the scenes into their offices. This holiday season, use Periscope to bring your fans into the middle of the action with live video streams which you can share on Twitter. This works best for brands with strong Twitter followings. One idea is to give your users a real winter wonderland experience by scoping a snowy city in the world, such as Moscow, or New York City.
Meerkat
Meerkat is another internet video phenomenon. Much like Periscope, it enables users to broadcast live video streaming through their mobile device. Once a user is registered, they have the option of syncing their Facebook and Twitter accounts with the app. They can also stream directly to their followers once they go live. The best part about Meerkat is that it’s free and you can stream for as long as you’d like.
Meerkat has become enormously popular with indie creators, much like Periscope, and has helped launched groundbreaking careers of a new generation of influence marketers. If anything, this should tell you that Meerkat isn’t just for established brands, it works really well for smaller business owners too! Just take this post on the Meerkat blog about one of its users, Nicole Chiu-Wang:
From being on The Apprentice to running her own startup; meet @theNicoleCW! Meerkat is designed to be accessible to newer users. For example, it helps address stage fright, or concerns about ambiance, which can sometimes negatively affect the experience of using a live video streaming platform. The informal nature of this app creates an environment in which users will find it easy to share their video live. As a precursor to the holidays, you can use Meerkat to your advantage by getting your audience involved in your video. Stream a video from the company about a question, like “What is your favorite food to eat on Christmas?” Share through Twitter or Facebook and encourage your fans to leave comments and feedback about the video. Meerkat also introduced community generated hashtags which is another way to use hashtags more dynamically.
Don’t ignore Facebook, though
Facebook isn’t standing by while these other apps capture its audience. Facebook is expanding its Live Video feature to the rest of its users after a limited phase where only celebrities could use it (and they did in very interesting ways). I mentioned Facebook’s substantial user-base earlier and that should only just highlight the importance of paying attention to how Live Video will be received by Facebook users. You could find that it offers a very compelling addition to your Facebook marketing strategy down the line.
Videos help us create memories that will last a lifetime, making them all the more personal. Memorable forms of content tend to perform better. Actually, it’s been estimated that by 2019, video will account for 80% of traffic on the internet. So, regardless of what kind of content you advertise, remember to use a video to make a huge impact this holiday season (and beyond).
Which awesome video marketing tools are you using this holiday season? Share your tips and tricks in the comments below.