For the past 9 years, YouTube has enjoyed sole supremacy in the world of online video marketing. It has been the go-to platform for online video marketing and the obvious choice of the majority for posting corporate and promotional videos. However, in the backdrop of recent developments things are in for a change. It seems that YouTube’s monotony is about to end as platforms like Facebook, Vine and Twitter seem eager to explore the domain of online video production and marketing.
Need for Change
Evolving consumer trends and behaviour necessitates that online corporate and promotional videos are made in line with recently identified consumer demands. This plays a key role in the success of an online video marketing campaign. Today, consumers prefer to watch online promotional and corporate videos that have fast upload times and can be easily and readily accessed. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Vine take a lead over YouTube when it comes to conforming to the aforementioned consumer demands. This is one of the main reasons behind the growing popularity of these social media sites as video marketing and sharing platforms.
According to a recent study by Socialbakers, more videos were uploaded on Facebook in 2014 than on YouTube. This indicates towards the growing inclination of users to access Facebook and Twitter to view videos. Similarly, currently around 700 videos are shared on Twitter every minute and the number is expected to increase with time. This is evidence enough to prove the growing popularity of Facebook, Twitter and Vine over YouTube, as leading platforms for online video marketing.
Video Marketing via Facebook
Facebook has come up with its own video hosting platform that is dedicated to video marketing and sharing. The overwhelming response and positive feedback to this initiative is suggestive of the fact that online video marketing trends are in for a drastic change.
What makes Facebook better than YouTube is the autoplay feature which does not require the users to press play to watch corporate and promotional videos and removes the hassle of interruptive adverts. Users only need to scroll the cursor over to the video and the video will play automatically. No wonder that recent findings suggest a rise by 38.5% in the number of videos shared on Facebook in 2014, in comparison to 4.8% increase recorded for YouTube videos.
Video Marketing via Twitter
Another new key player in the domain of online video marketing is Twitter. It is really easy and convenient to stream and upload corporate and promotional videos on Twitter and the entire process does not take more than a few seconds. Hence, video marketing and sharing is not only faster on Twitter but it is cost-effective too!
What’s the future for Video Marketing?
In the backdrop of the success of Facebook’s, Twitter’s and Vine’s video hosting platforms it is being speculated that Pinterest will also enter the race soon. These social media platforms enjoy increased consumer exposure which allows better engagement and interaction which is not possible on YouTube. Moreover, YouTube lacks features like ‘feed’ and ‘wall’. The only advantage that YouTube seems to have over Facebook, Twitter and Vine is that it supports longer videos. But this may be of little benefit for the video sharing site.
Let’s face it. To some extent YouTube too relies on social media platforms to make the videos go viral. Hence, with the launch of Facebook’s and Twitter’s video hosting platforms the video sharing site is sure to suffer from a setback.
Recent developments have raised questions on the survival of YouTube as a leading video marketing platform. Until and unless YouTube goes for a re-vamp to incorporate more user-friendly features, it is likely that social media video hosting platforms will dominate the world of online video marketing in the near future.
If you want to make an impact with your corporate video, or need some advice on promoting it to the world, get in touch with our video production team of experts at Holler today.
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