Social video to continue rise in 2019, but barriers remain

More than three quarters of organisations are planning to invest in social videos as a tactic to succeed on social media in 2019.

Yet lack of time and budget are seen as barriers to creating video content, according to reports from two social media software platforms.

Hootsuite, authors of one of the reports, say social video is the top ranked tactic for growth among people in charge of social media, above paid ad formats.

Yet more than half of them (52%) cite the lack of video creation skills and budget as one of their biggest challenges.

It’s a story echoed by Buffer, who found lack of time (66.5%) and no budget (41.6%) as the biggest factors holding people back from creating video content, while less than a quarter (23.7%) weren’t sure what to create.

Against this backdrop though video content continues to grow in popularity, with only 14.5% of businesses surveyed by Buffer for their State of Social report not publishing videos on social during the previous year. More than a third were publishing content monthly and just less than a quarter were publishing it weekly.

Facebook was the most popular place to publish video content (81.2%) followed by YouTube and Instagram. Only 45.6% of organisations posted video content to Twitter, despite it being the second most popular social channel overall, with 84.4% of organisations using it, suggesting there’s still plenty of room for growth in video on Twitter and a reason to get in now ahead of your competitors.

It is a similar story with LinkedIn, which is used by 70% of organisations but only 32.6% publish video content there.

Buffer’s report also sheds some light on the metrics organisations are using to measure success on social media. Nearly two-thirds (66.4%) see like/shares/comments as a key metric, followed by interaction with the brand (59.5%) and generating discussion (50.8%).

With social media platforms becoming more crowded as organisations fight for attention, it’s no surprise that more people are turning their attention to paid media.

“By now everyone knows we’re in the pay-to-play era on social”, writes Hootsuite, a statement backed up by Facebook already accounting for 23% of total US digital ad spending.

64% of people told Hootsuite that the decline in Facebook’s organic reach and the need to increase paid budgets was one of the biggest challenges they faced, while more than 65% of organisations told Buffer they planned to increase their social media advertising budget in 2019.

All of this is combining to drive up prices with Facebook click-through-rate costs increasing by 61%.

And it’s not simply enough to pay, as ‘compelling visuals … are essential for clicks and high conversion rates on social media’.

Have a chat with us about our low-cost, frequent, social media video offering to help you drive up engagement on social on 2019.