Twitter plays its ‘social video’ Trump card

Twitter hit the headlines this week after posting a $167 million loss in the final three months of 2016.

An expected ‘Donald Trump’ bounce – brought about by his heavy use of the network during his campaign for the Presidency – failed to produce an upturn in ad revenue.

But Twitter has been attracting the attention of the Senate Media office in the past week for different reasons. (Too many mentions of Trump and Senate in the same article is going to play merry hell with our SEO – Ed.)

Namely the publication of some fascinating new stats on the rise of social video. Not least the headline stat that video views on Twitter have increased by some 220 times in the past year.

Twitter has released the data as part of a drive to encourage brands to use it as a video advertising platform, so perhaps needs to be approached with an awareness of the self-interest involved in their release.

But they echo the noises coming out of Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and others.

Video is the most shared media on Twitter, receiving six times more retweets than photos and three times more than GIFs. Yes even those favoured animated GIFs are only half as effective as video.

93% of video views on Twitter are on mobile – an extraordinarily high number which means making those videos work silently through the use of subtitles or on-screen text is critical.

And there are also some interesting stats on the effectiveness of message delivery through video.

People respond emotionally twice as much to videos on Twitter than they do to text or photos according to GSR testing.

And a separate study for Twitter shows video drives a 29% uplift in message association, an 18% uplift in brand recall, and 9% increase in favourability, when compared with a control group who hadn’t watched videos on Twitter.

The uplift in message association is particularly relevant for the types of video we deal with, which are typically all about the message.

Twitter also claims to contain more of the content that people want to see than other social networks. 28% of respondents said they visit Twitter for video content because it has videos from people they are interested in. This compares to 21% for YouTube and 19% for Facebook.

Twitter, one could say, trumps other networks when it comes to video.