Last year a lot of reports said mobile data is show huge growth in the next 4 years, Cisco Said The Middle East and Africa will have the strongest mobile data traffic growth of any region with a 72‑percent CAGR. This region will be followed by Central and Eastern Europe at 71 percent and Latin America at 59 percent. With the growth, Social networks are focusing on Videos, especially for on Smartphones. Mobile video on Smartphones drives high purchase intent as reported by eMarketer.
Usage of Mobile by Region
With these reports, the Social Media videos competition, especially between Facebook, YouTube & Twitter is getting really tense.
YouTube is of course by far the winner of this competition, but with the efforts of Facebook & Twitter, YouTube got themselves serious competitors.
Moving forward, lets me highlight some of the key announcements made and featured introduced by the other two companies in 2014 and 2015 (so far) in hope of having a higher share of online videos.
[Tweet “In 4 years; #MENA will have the strongest mobile data traffic growth #MeSocialMedia #SocialMedia”]
Video Posts gets higher reach on Facebook
Facebook have been encouraging their users to upload videos directly to their platform by giving more reach to video posts.
Socialbackers did a study on Facebook’s reach, and found out that Facebook have been maximizing the Video Reach vs other media
The study says that videos got 2.4% more Average Fan Reach than photo posts.
The reason behind this is Facebook is trying to get a greater share of videos from YouTube.
a week ago, Facebook announced during their F8 8 New Things You Can Do With Facebook
[Tweet “Video Posts gets higher reach on Facebook #SocialMediaMarketing”]
Embed Facebook video posts on other sites
Facebook now allow users to embed videos on their websites, which will save users a lot of time (Re-uploading videos) and will help videos spread a lot faster and across many sites.
The video-hosting features, with the right work, can really make Facebook compete with YouTube. Facebook has been going after advertisers and publishers in a big way lately, and adding support for embeds — which allow videos to spread off-platform — is a critical step toward building its video presence.
here’s an example
[php]
echo ‘
<div id=”fb-root”></div><script>(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = “//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.3″; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));</script><div class=”fb-video” data-allowfullscreen=”true” data-href=”https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=428790880613080&set=vb.100004465141728&type=1″><div class=”fb-xfbml-parse-ignore”><blockquote cite=”https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=428790880613080&set=vb.100004465141728&type=1″><a href=”https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=428790880613080&set=vb.100004465141728&type=1″></a><p>WOW, Oscars! 3.7B Impressions!</p>Posted by <a href=”https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=428790880613080&set=vb.100004465141728&type=1″>Amged Osman</a> on Monday, March 30, 2015</blockquote></div></div>
‘;
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https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=428790880613080&pnref=story
[Tweet “#Facebook now allow users to embed videos on their websites #Blogging”]
Shoot and share 360-degree videos
Facebook will support 360-degree videos “spherical video” on their platform and in the Oculus hardware. It’s created through Oculus VR. It’s not yet clear when the video feature will be available to users.
[Tweet “#Spherical video to be available soon on #Facebook [ #SocialMedia ]”]
Twitter’s effort on Videos cannot cease to amaze me
Twitter have been doing great job on videos.They rolled out couple of new features that really put them in the competition
Twitter Video Cards
Last year, a -now live feature- was rolled out for a small number of users, which is the Promoted Videos.
Promoted Videos allowed advertisers to upload videos directly to twitter via advertiser’s dashboard , which then they can promote it using all available targeting tools and analytics.
6 Main differences between Twitter Promoted Video Cards and Twitter 3rd Party Player Cards
[Tweet “6 Main differences between Twitter Promoted Video Cards and 3rd Party Player Cards #SocialMediaStrategy”]
[php]
echo <<<HTML
<table class=”table table-condensed text-uppercase”>
<tr class=”text-center”>
<td class=”bg-primary”><strong>3rd Party Players</strong></td>
<td class=”bg-success”><strong>Twitter Promoted Videos</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr class=”text-left”>
<td class=”text-primary”>Double tap to play (not media forward)</td>
<td class=”text-success”>One tap to play, media forward</td>
</tr>
<tr class=”text-left”>
<td class=”text-primary”>Charge for all tweet engagements</td>
<td class=”text-success”>Cost per view pricing</td>
</tr>
<tr class=”text-left”>
<td class=”text-primary”>Analytics aggregated off platform</td>
<td class=”text-success”>Video completion reporting</td>
</tr>
<tr class=”text-left”>
<td class=”text-primary”>Harder to draw users’ attention</td>
<td class=”text-success”>Social actions in full screen</td>
</tr>
<tr class=”text-left”>
<td class=”text-primary”>Cost per engagement pricing</td>
<td class=”text-success”>Earned media on other engagements</td>
</tr>
<tr class=”text-left”>
<td class=”text-primary”>Drives traffic off platform</td>
<td class=”text-success”>Picture-in-picture viewing</td>
</tr>
</table>
HTML;
[/php]
If you wish, you can read my Arabic article on how to setup Twitter Promoted Videos, The article also shows live examples of the Promoted Video Cards.
The feature was a great great for advertisers who knew how to use it, here’s a great example in our region, the video promoted by @eMorror, the campaign was created by friend @Ibhm from Hype KSA Agency
صور.. حرك.. بلغ
الخطوات الجديدة عند وقوع حادث مروري للمساعدة في تخفيف الزحام، يشترط توفر التأمين#المرور_السعوديhttps://t.co/i2pw5nTzKi— #المرور_السعودي (@eMoroor) February 15, 2015
[php function=4]
Native Mobile Video
Later on a Twitter made possible to record live videos from mobile video camera and upload it directly to it’s platform, the feature was released first for iOS, then made available for Android devices.
Twitter Videos are 30 seconds in length, which is more than instagram by 4 seconds and more than video with 24 seconds and this should give it the edge over other platforms
Cisco also said we will see 13x video growth in the next four years.
Twitter Says 90% of twitter video views are on mobile
82% of twitter users watch video content on Twitter
Users on Twitter are 25% more likely to discover video first vs. the average consumer
Needless to say that Twitter Videos can gets distributed everywhere, embedding tweets with players/media was made available on twitter way before Facebook
[Tweet “82% of twitter users watch video content on Twitter – #SocialMedia – #TwitterTips”]
Twitter Amplify Program
Twitter also has one of the greatest tools today that works perfectly with TV ads, which is the Twitter Amplify Program.
Twitter Amplify enables media companies and brands to bind any buzz on TV with Twitter and distribute their content to fans and audiences across Twitter, beyond their followers.
Audiences can immediately engage with the brand on their mobile phones and #JoinTheConversation on Twitter.
WATCH: New Twitter Amplify product video – what it is and how it works in less than 90 seconds.https://t.co/A34qmDGAaa
— Twitter Amplify (@TwitterAmplify) September 30, 2014
[Tweet “90% of audiences who were exposed to twitter amplify tweets were not followers of the media partner or sponsor”]
Twitter Storytelling
Twitter’s effort did not stop there, they recently introduced Storytelling, which is the ability to tell your very own story through videos that can be edited within the Twitter app while recording your videos. Here’s my short and -not-very-creative- storytelling
Twitter #storytelling ? A huge step forward in #SocialMedia video war! pic.twitter.com/hSmdNwBA8J
— Amged Osman ??? (@Amged) March 30, 2015
[Tweet “Try Twitter #Storytelling Native Videos and tell your story #SocialMedia”]
Periscope
Lastly, 2 days ago Twitter introduced Periscope, which is a live broad casting app, that shares your live broadcast on Timeline. I think it’s a perfect tool for Twitter, especially that people go to twitter for live updates and news – read about how you can use Twitter & Google deal to get the best of Twitter being a great source for live news.
*note: one of my friends told me a cool info today about why did they name it Periscope, its because periscopes looks like Meerkats when they stand! – not sure if it’s true or not though
[Tweet “The Competition on Social Media Videos Share by @Amged”]
I hope I covered most of the updates, if you have a different opinion, please do feel free to share it with the rest of us.
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