Tag Archives: viewer

What social media site refers the best video viewer engagement?

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Social networking and bookmarking sites are a critical part of any online marketing effort utilizing video because you need to get your video seen where your key demographic is spending time online.

TubeMogul recently completed a research case study to find exactly what the title of this post asks: what social media site refers the least fickle viewers? They sampled 6,763,690 video streams over three months referred by links from Digg, Facebook and Twitter to come up with the findings. I’m going to highlight a few of the real key points to talk about but here’s the link to read the full results from their research report.

Results from TubeMogul

The results (below) are surprising: on average, viewers referred by Twitter tend to watch a video the longest (one minute, 58 seconds), compared to Facebook (one minute, 14 seconds) and Digg (58 seconds).

On average, audiences clicking on video links from Twitter watch a video 36.91% longer than viewers referred by Facebook and 49.98% longer than viewers referred by Digg.

My Analysis

This is an interesting study and the numbers are intriguing but there are a few things that the study doesn’t take into account.

Separation of social media sites & social bookmarking sites

I would have liked to have seen Twitter and Facebook (possibly even MySpace and LinkedIn too) go head to head and Digg go up against other bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, etc. My reason for this is that typically you are more connected with people on social media sites than on social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites are cluttered with millions of links people are sharing with others they may not even know. So it’s a less direct form of sharing than say Twitter or Facebook where you (usually) have a more established relationship with the possible viewer clicking your link. Most bookmarking sites have a lot of users who are lightly “browsing” content and clicking on something that may sound interesting but then quickly clicking away if their interest isn’t peaked. On Facebook for instance if I share a video, only people who have some sort of relationship with me are going to see it and are therefore more likely to watch more of the video. So it would have been nice to see a comparison of apples to apples.

Yes its video…but what is the content?

This may seem like a stupid question but if 75% of the videos profiled were of a cat playing the piano…what does that actually tell you? It would have been great to cull out the user generated content and just focus on videos that have some sort of at least a vague marketing purpose, whether its a direct sell on down to the nebulous but humorous branding video. I realize this is nearly impossible to achieve, however including all that user generated content as part of the research definitely skews the numbers. Let’s face it…if you upload a video of your dog barking at the TV – you don’t really care how many people watch it to completion but if you put a branding video online with a call to action – that’s information you want to know.

Time of day comparisons

Just like email marketing where you have better days of the week or times of day to send your email to get ideal open rates or click through rates, social media works much the same way. It would have been interesting to see over a three month period what days of the week and hours of the day had higher engagement rates.

What the numbers tell me

Ultimately the numbers don’t matter. Well…they matter but its a giant brush stroke of the entire social media space, not necessarily YOUR demographic and how THEY are engaging in social media. So you have to keep this in mind when you delve into these numbers. If the key demographic you market to is predominantly on MySpace but you are just sharing your video link on Twitter because this research report told you to – you could be missing your mark.

Personally over the past 3 months, SmartMarket Media has had better engagement rates from LinkedIn (2 minutes 35 seconds) followed by Twitter (2 minutes 32 seconds),  Facebook (1 minute, 40 seconds), (StumbleUpon (0 minutes, 45 seconds) and Digg (0 minutes, 37 seconds). Obviously we have a much smaller sampling (hundreds of visitors rather than millions) but it just goes to show you need to know your customer base and engage where they are engaging.

What do you think? What do these numbers tell you?

Effective call-to-action with e-commerce video

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e-commerce-shopping-cart

Recently there’s been a lot of talk online about how video can help e-commerce and adding interactivity to video is a natural progression to keep the viewer engaged. There was a great blog post written on effective trigger design for interactive video commerce which answers the question – how should video interactivity be applied to e-commerce video? It’s always been part of my approach on each project, what is the end goal? Are you a non-profit looking for donations, a company selling products looking for a purchase or maybe you are looking for viewers to contact you for more information and become more engaged with your brand? There are three steps (according to the Video Commerce Consortium blog post) to creating an effective trigger or call-to-action, I’m going to elaborate on each:

1. The trigger must be noticeable. This sounds self explanatory, but you’d be surprised to realize that most consumers are passive viewers of online video content, they aren’t used to interacting with it. It also needs to be blatantly obvious to the viewer that interaction is possible.

2. The trigger must be associated with the targeted behavior. When you are creating a call-to-action, think carefully about the wording and design because they can have a huge impact on the viewers expectations. Don’t have a button that says “Product information” really be a link directly to add an item to a shopping cart. As an example, we have a customer who sells generally to engineers who will want to see product specifications before they consider purchasing so we incorporated a “Download Specifications PDF” right into the video. Carefully design the call-to-actions within your video experience to meet your viewers expectations.

3. The trigger must occur when the user is both motivated and able to perform the target behavior. The great thing about online video is we can be more subtle with a call-to-action. As the Video Commerce Consortium blog post points out “clicking a mouse is still easier than picking up the phone”. But scripting the video so the ask is part of the story is key, when are your customers most motivated to buy? Is it after a particular product or feature where a button can pop up so they can click that for more information about that feature?

Not sure where your video is peaking curiousity or if there is a falloff in viewership before they get to your call-to-action? Using a video measurement service like Visible Measures can precisely calculate video engagement by capturing every event that occurs within an Internet video player – each play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, share, embed, and more.

Not sure how to build those call-to-actions within your video? I recommend Flimp which has a great WYSIWYG interface to create landing pages and e-mail integration with Constant Contact as well as a few other major email service providers. I also suggest Permission TV which offers an outstanding video platform allowing you to build those call-to-action links right into the video player creating more interactive experiences to everyone who visits your site. Both offer outstanding analytics so you can track and analyze your video’s performance.

Ultimately a call-to-action is useless unless the video itself is engaging and can easily be found. If your video is buried on your website, who’s going to see it? What if the content is so boring no one ever gets to the call-to-action?

What you need to do is to think of the call-to-action within your video and the trigger button or action as one seamless process, not separate parts. That is the future of online video, it’s all part of the viewer experience.

That’s what I think anyway, what about you?

 

 

Online Video Driving Automotive Recovery

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constant-contact-zak-barronIn a great article recently published on the Online Video Insider by Eric Franchi, some great statistics and insight were shared which are particularly timely given Chrysler’s and General Motors’ recent bankruptcy announcements. Perhaps as they pick which road to take the companies future on they should reassess their level of participation in social media and particularly online video.

Here were a few of the highlights from that post for the automakers to keep in mind and my thoughts on these suggestions:


“83% of new vehicle buyers visit video focused Web sites prior to purchasing a car. This means 31% viewed videos on brand, product or company sites; 24% on auto-specific Web sites, 11% on YouTube; 7%, Yahoo Video; 7%, news sites; 6%, MSN Video; 4%, MySpace; 3%, Facebook; 3%, AOL Video; and 3%, other.”

These numbers from a recent Google sponsored study highlight a few really important factors that automakers need to keep in mind regarding online video and how viewers are searching and researching online. I’d be willing to bet that in a short amount of time YouTube, Yahoo Video, Facebook, etc. will garner a much larger piece of the viewership.


“Don’t skimp on production. A full one-third of auto shoppers watch the video content on the product site.”

So once you have the viewer engaged with a demo of the vehicle, why not lead them to other videos of the same vehicle they are looking at instead of (or maybe in addition to) pages of text information? Maybe it’s crash tests…shown from different angles? Maybe keeping something fragile like an egg inside safe during the crash? You can get really creative here but the object is to keep the viewer engaged and on your site.

Think about Blendtec and how they engaged their viewers by showing them real simple demonstrations of how their blender worked by blending ridiculously common things. Many of those interested viewers became brand loyalists for them.


“Investigate the broader video opportunity. Brand and auto-specific sites only make up slightly more than half of the automotive shopper’s online experience. Creating a presence on YouTube and other video destinations will help round out the plan.”

Why stop there? While video sharing sites like YouTube are a place that I think the automakers MUST have a presence, what about Facebook, LinkedIn or smaller automobile enthusiast user groups? The automakers could use these brand enthusiasts and interested buyers for research and development. They could find out what features and options people are REALLY looking for in a car. Let the group members participate in the design of new cars, show them videos of new concepts as they are created based on the group’s input and get feedback from the group. Imagine that kind of empowerment could turn them from potential buyers into the automakers brand evangelists.

David Meerman Scott wrote an outstanding post on marketing ideas for the automakers reinvention outlining 5 simple things GM could do to accelerate their hopeful rebound. I hope GM and Chrysler read his post because it had some great ideas. Automakers will be under a watchful eye with their marketing budget, so doesn’t using a tiny portion of their bloated television advertising budget to put a creative online video and social media plan together just make sense? Obviously I think so…what are your thoughts?

Increasing Donations Using Video & E-Mail Marketing

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How Stanford University increased alumni donations.

Seeing how I’ve already talked about how integrating video in your email marketing can increase your click throughs by 175% I thought I’d profile another success story I read about online. Much of the information on this is exerpted from a great blog post by Tyler Willis for MediaPost called “When Juggernauts Collide: Email Marketing Meets Video Marketing” Here are the highlights of what I found most interesting from his post.

“Recent grads are far more likely to give a valid email address than a number (93% of the captive population vs. 38%), meaning that email marketing gives Stanford a better and more widespread ability to connect.”

Snail mail and “dialing-for-dollars” are incredibly inefficient ways to connect with new grads. Namely because direct mail is assumed to be junk mail by most recipients and you only get a response of about 2% (if you are lucky). Phone calling on the other hand is incredibly interruptive, who knows what the end user was doing or what you interrupted them from doing. Email is passive and can be opened or read when the end user is ready to read or respond to it.

Scott Jahnke, the Director of Student and Young Alumni Development, explains why he chose to combine email AND video as part of Stanford’s new alumni drive “Technology gives us the ability to do so much more than just text. How then, can we most effectively tell our story to thousands of people and inspire them to give? I believe that a combination of using email AND video to answer our three questions (why are we asking you for a gift, what is going to change if you give, and how will our organization make that change happen) is the so-called ‘secret sauce.”

“At Stanford, the Young Alumni office produced several inspiring videos of students who had directly benefited from alumni contributions and attached a clear call-to-action to the end of each video, delivered via a Flash overlay that asked viewers to donate.”

This was key, by providing this call to action they were able to easily and effectively drive their alumni to take the steps they wanted them to take. Without a call-to-action, online video doesn’t effectively do it’s job.

“Calling out these videos, and providing a direct link to them in four out of five emails sent during Stanford’s fall campaign, helped increase gifts by 23% over the previous year’s fall campaign.”

This is a great first result and if they continue to refine their approach will probably become even more efficient. Couple this with the fact that they probably dramatically reduced their printing and postage costs from their direct mail campaign and/or their costs if they hired current students to do the telemarketing as part of a work study program. How does that affect their operational costs? Does it make their alumni gifts go longer.

If one of the most respected universities in the United States was able to buck the old trend of typical alumni gift campaigns and get these kind of outstanding results, what could combining the online marketing super powers of email marketing and online video do for your business or non-profit?

 

 

How do people discover videos online?

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Once again TubeMogul has released some pretty awesome statistical analysis regarding how people find videos online, from embeds on blogs to video search engines. For a two-month period, they recorded inbound URLs for a sample of over 35 million video streams from six top video sites. But which sources drive the most video views? For the full report from TubeMogul Industry Analysis, continue reading here. Here are some of the highlighted statistics that I found truly interesting:

45% of viewers find a video by direct navigation to a video site (i.e. going to YouTube and searching or clicking around the featured or related videos).

No surprise here given that over 10 hours of video footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute that going directly to the video sharing sites and searching would be the top method of finding videos.

In terms of individual web sites referring traffic, no single source dominated, here are the top 20 individual referrers:

Site Share of Video Referrals
google 7.19%
yahoo 2.12%
facebook 1.93%
myspace 1.55%
digg 1.49%
stumbleupon 1.13%
msn/live 0.92%
blogspot 0.78%
aol 0.43%
reddit 0.29%
truveo 0.22%
flurl 0.21%
blinkx 0.19%
ask 0.19%
comcast 0.16%
twitter 0.15%
wordpress 0.15%
cnn 0.12%
wikipedia 0.11%
ovguide 0.06%

However, since there are a limited number of players in certain areas online, TubeMogul was able to infer that:

  • 11.18% of all traffic comes from search engines
  • 3.66% comes from social networks
  • 3.19% comes from social bookmarking sites
  • 0.63% derives from video search engines
  • 0.05% is directed from Email/IM
  • 80.88% makes up the rest of the referred traffic…of this mix it is almost completely made up of blogs from the thousands of different blogs they scanned.

Here are the really interesting facts here:

Digg beats StumbleUpon by nearly 0.4% for video referrals

I wouldn’t have guessed that. When I share videos on both social bookmarking sites my traffic from StumbleUpon is nearly triple the traffic I receive from Digg. StumbleUpon is my #4 traffic source for the website (which of course does include my blog posts) bringing in 9.97% of my site traffic while Digg is my #10 source of traffic (also including my blog posts) accounting for about 3.85% of all my site traffic. About half of my bookmarks are for videos while the other half are for blog posts (possibly even this one will end up on both). Of course this is just me and I am not profiling over 35 million videos for my statistics.

0.05% is directed from Email/IM

This I find staggering to be so low. One of the easiest and most cost effective ways to get people to share your videos is through email marketing – particularly to an existing base of people who have opted in to receive your email newsletter. In a recent post about integrating video into your email marketing campaign I found that there was a significant 175% increase in click-throughs when video content was included in an email campaign. It sounds like a lot of people are missing the boat on this possible distribution channel.

Blogs sourcing most of the 80.88% of all referred traffic in this sample.

To those trying to make a video go viral, this should be telling you to reach out to relevant bloggers who could help you tremendously with the push for video views.

0.63% derives from video search engines

This is bad news to the ever increasing number of online video search sites that seem to keep popping up promising to help your video go viral or supposedly helping you search. With less than a 1% take, that doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. I’ve long held that most of these sites have very little value to the online video producer – this study just proves my theory.

So the real take-a-way here…

…is engaging bloggers to work with you by sharing the video with them. If nearly 81% of video traffic is coming from blogs it only makes sense to try and engage relevant bloggers to share your video. The other real key that isn’t really discussed is to make sure you optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it can easily be found by those who are searching.