Hey everybody and welcome to the #trending in video blog brought to you by Best Made Videos®. This is the blog format where we bring you all of the latest tips and trends in the world of videography and video production. Today we are looking at three articles. The first is from Yahoo finance, the second is from 99 Designs and the third is from wibbitz.com.
The first article by Yahoo finance is talking all about the top Instagram video marketing trends according to digital marketing agencies, in the last couple of years. The article begins Instagram boasts over 1 billion monthly active users and 80% of those people follow businesses on Instagram. Topmarketingcompanies.com determined the best marketing trends to help businesses cultivate professional Instagram accounts and to help grow their audiences and improve engagement. We are going to look at some of those top marketing trends today and see how they relate to us in the world of videography. Topmarketingcompanies.com is a B2B marketing company connecting brands with digital marketing experts. They identified the leading Instagram marketing trends that businesses can use to grow and engage audiences in 2020 and beyond.
According to them, the top Instagram video marketing trend is using stories to help boost engagement. That's number one. With 68% of millennial Instagram users viewing stories on the platform compared to Snapchat's 49%. They advise you to incorporate more video content and to help cultivate that video content strategy. There has been an 80% increase in the time users spend watching videos on Instagram and that should help motivate you to not only produce more videos but also to format your videos in a way that is mobile friendly. That could be by producing vertical videos or more short form videos or a myriad of other things that can make them more mobile friendly. They recommend that you post higher quality content, not necessarily more. They note that more frequently posting on the platform is not necessarily correlated with higher engagement, so whether it's videos or other types of photos, you should make sure that the content is of high quality, not necessarily posting videos just to post videos.
The fourth trend that they recommend is continuing to use targeted influencer marketing. They note that for every $1 spent on influencer marketing, businesses are making an average of $5.20 and the most successful businesses make $20 or more per every dollar spent on influencers talking about their brands or making videos about their brands.
The article concludes that you can view some of the top ranked Instagram marketing companies by price, expertise and locations on the website, topmarketingcompanies.com and again top marketing companies is a B2B marketplace connecting brands with digital marketing experts around the world. Their site acts as a directory of digital marketing companies, carefully ranked by their area of expertise, industry and U S location.
The second article we're looking at brought to you by 99 Designs is 12 innovative video marketing trends for 2020. Each year the ever-growing video sector sees trends come and go, while it might not be especially wise to jump onto each and every video trend, it is good to keep an eye on them as you continue to optimize your video marketing strategy. The article notes that so far this year they've seen some trends ramp up and they've seen other start to fade away and it's hard to keep up, so they are bringing you a list of the top 12 video marketing tips that they recommend.
Number one, Facebook live may be dead, but live video is still going to live on. Facebook live, according to 99 Designs was one of the biggest bus of 2017 not many. Facebook's video initiatives have garnered great results for video creators, Facebook live, Facebook watch, and regularly autoplay Facebook videos have seen publishers chasing views and following this prophecy without achieving great results themselves. And therefore, a lot of these video platforms have already shut down on Facebook. But live video isn't a trend that's going to disappear altogether, on the contrary, quite in fact, live video has already secured a firm place in the video ecosystem. But what exactly that place is remains to be discovered.
The concept of live media is an incredibly engaging one, and the secret ingredient for that engagement is live interactions with real people. Snapchat and Instagram users will notice that people go live multiple times a day. Those live feeds usually consists of answering questions in video format or showing other fun behind the scenes video moments. This kind of content video content is designed to take advantage of the ephemeral nature of the moment. While Instagram provides the ability to save these videos to your profile, the odds of someone watching an hour long live stream are quite unlikely. This is what makes this sort of video platform so powerful, it encourages people to watch the video in the moment and to interact with the video in real time. It's recreating the sensation of live radio and TV, which used to command people all over the country or the world to experience the same thing at the same time. Live video is here this day, so keep experimenting with the medium
This article recommends tip number two videos are going to become shoppable. That's another trend that we've been talking about recently on the trending in video blog is shoppable videos. These are video ads that feature links to a product within the world of the video. Instagram stories and Snapchat feature a lot of these types of videos, but the technology is becoming more sophisticated. It's reasonable to predict that you'll soon be able to buy products by directly interacting with those objects in the video. If there's a chair featured in a video, you might be able to hover over it and find out more about that particular model. The same is going to go for mobile videos as well, and that's being reviewed through YouTube and other mediums as we speak. The options really are limitless, but for now you're going to see more videos highlighting specific products in a stream often with a shoppable link at the end.
The third trend we're talking about is interactive 360 degree video technology, and we did a whole blog post a couple of days ago talking all about user and consumer friendly 360 video cameras. They note that interactive 360 degree video is a huge trend at the moment. You can experience Broadway musical sports games and iconic locations. It's an immersive, futuristic video style that they are expected to see a lot more of as augmented reality and virtual reality continue to grow and usage. If you're ambitious enough, you might want to try this type of video, it's not easy to produce yet, but it could be a great way to set your product videos apart from your competition.
One-To-One video experiences are going to continue. Recently we've seen an explosion in the use of Zoom with people telecommuting and working from home and software like Google Hangouts and Zoom are going to continue to improve the video conferencing experience by being able to feature more than just one person talking to another. The ability to see another person and to share screens, the lens itself quite nicely to tech support, but beyond that it can also be a great way to teach which we are experiencing here at Best Made Videos® with my wife teaching from home. There's nothing quite like seeing another person looking them eye to eye to truly communicate effectively. The intimacy of this type of video trumps communicating via phone call, chat app, or sending an email.
Number five on here is that everyone is going to be vlogging and soon. Vlogging is one of those videos, genres that is really easy to poke fun at, but it's really hard to ignore as there are many changes on the platform of YouTube, vlogging continues to grow. On Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, as well as many other popular blogging platforms the explosion of this type of video continues to rise with the addition of live streaming video as a feature, vloggers are diversifying the types of video content they present. In some cases they're turning live streaming into their weekly or daily vlogging video content, creating more polished videos to drop once a month and using those live vlogs to talk with their followers on a daily basis.
Number six, videos are going to be easily searchable and we've talked about this before on the blog with transcribing your videos to provide captions for SEO or for your audience to read along with. Just as social networks. They've integrated video into their core offering, search engines have done this as well, namely Google. Over the past few years, videos of inch closer and closer to the top of the organic search results on desktop and mobile searches. Google is now progressing this further with the announcement that they're going to be using artificial intelligence to identify snippets of video content related to search inquiries and have those results autoplay on the top of search results. This'll make video even more important to effective SEO or search engine optimization for brands and businesses. It's also going to increase the importance of optimizing the video content that you are creating for search results. Just like you would with an article you're hoping to rank well, you're going to need to do the same with the videos that you're producing. It's a continuation of the importance that video is going to have to the discovery of your business or brand.
Number seven on the list, training and educational videos are going to continue to expand. Training and education videos are already a huge sector of the internet that is utilizing video. If you think about Skillshare or masterclass or all of the hundreds of thousands of free video tutorials you can find for free on video websites like YouTube, you can also charge people for the same content. The trend is going to continue to grow and we suspect that brands and businesses that sell products are going to start creating their own video content to teach people how to use their products. What's most interesting about this trend is that people are already going to look for videos, how the answer questions that they have more so than they ever have in the past. For how to questions, videos are justifiably more useful content. Gone are the days of reading user manuals or how to books. People want to find high quality video content that can help them through their problems and that they can follow along with step-by-step to get to their solution.
There's going to be a lot more stories, this is number eight on the list. As mentioned in the vlogging section, stories that exist for only a short period of time have become the new form of video blogging. Because they are mostly done in the moment, they don't always require editing and they've lowered the bar for people who have always wanted to be video personalities. If you are an Instagram or Snapchat user, you might have noted that some of your friends have already become amateur video personalities. We're going to see this type of video continue to gain prominence through YouTube, Facebook, and other online social websites. One reason that this is exciting and similar to podcasts is that people will watch and aren't going to be overly picky about the quality that they are expecting to see. This also means that we can see things advertise within these video streams. Podcasts have done this sort of midstream style of advertising. They're usually presented by the shows presenter and they can sometimes be live to tape and off the cuff. This works well because the video personalities are able to pitch products that they are trying to sell in the midst of the other content that they're creating.
Number nine, more platforms are going to have more video dimensions. As more video platforms get introduced, the preference for video dimensions, whether square video, video or vertical video is going to continue to expand. Snapchat and Instagram have increased the popularity of vertical videos and YouTube and Facebook are going to start supporting that as well. They note that IGTV, which was Instagram's video platform, hit a wall when they tried to push it to users to upload vertical video content. A lot of people ended up free booting content from YouTube and merely rotated at 90 degrees to fit vertical dimensions. So now because of the general low usage of it, Instagram has recently announced that they're going to support normal horizontal video in IGTV. A similar journey has been undergone with square video. At one point it was thought that square video content performed better on Facebook and was a better fit for Instagram video as well. Since then the platform has started supporting photos in broader dimensions and the videos have followed suit as well. The square video trend is generally less present on Facebook and YouTube, hey feel like it's never going to fully embrace that trend. Are we going to see more square videos in the next few months or have videos returned to their normal dimensions? We are going to have to wait and see where this trend in video takes us.
The number 10 note on this article is that we are all going to be watching silent video soon. When Facebook introduced an auto play feature where it automatically plays videos within your stream with no sound, it was a game changer. They later admitted that it was counting in the minimal number of seconds as full views, no matter how long or short the video was. So the idea of watching videos without sound caught on. The author of this article notes that they are never, they are not sure if Facebook ever thought so far as to predict that people would elect to watch whole videos without turning the sound on. But that's basically what ended up happening. And now publishers have created videos with subtitles and enough animation and imagery to give context over what they are watching with no need to turn on the sound. Now Instagram also auto plays it's videos, so does LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. As auto playing videos continues, it's rising trends, so does the consumption of video with no sound.
Video ads are going to become much more immersive, mid roll and longer, this is number 11 in the list. As mentioned in the 360 degree video section, immersive videos are gradually increasing and so is the interest in them. Immersive stories are going to be the next frontier for video ads. Immersive ads have the potential of giving users kind of a sense of what their life will be like after using the product or buying it. Could you imagine if you were able to simulate the product that you are selling? Allowing the users to see what color would best suit them or how they would be able to fit that product into their lives. You could also have a productivity tool that consumers could interact with so they could see their schedule being organized in real time. That's the potential of immersive ads. You can combine virtual reality or augmented reality with your live camera to get the product into the hands of potential users. The goal appears to bring video ads and the video experience back to the days of linear television with ads popping up in the middle of shows or other videos with no option to skip them. The problem with small videos on platforms like YouTube and Facebook as these videos usually aren't long enough or formatted in a way that allows them to be interrupted with a video ad, but expect these advertisers and platforms to keep exploring the idea of inserting ads into videos.
Midstream video ads are also getting longer according to Media Radar from January 2018 to February of this year, the number of six second ads decrease by 20% while the number of 32nd video ads increased to 19 to 24% of all ads. Along with the length of the ads on videos, expect another change to be the duration of the ads that play on sites before the users can skip them. Sites had been experimenting with increasing that to 15 seconds on YouTube. 15 seconds is apparently the sweet spot of not too short and not too long to explain your product or a pitch, expect this video trend to continue into next year.
The final note on this list is more showing than less explaining and that is another trend that will evolve and continue in video content. Videos allow us to do more than just provide an explanation in text or as a voiceover. It can allow us to show what things look like, how they work, how they can fit in your life, and more importantly, what they're made of. Sometimes you can do all of this without words. If you had a Masterclass video, for example, putting together Ikea furniture. The immersive ad trends continue and so does the silent video trend.
The article concludes that as always, this case is ever changing in the video market and trends are likely to come and go sometimes very quickly. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't explore these video trends and the key to ensuring that whatever you're doing is working is trying to fit your strategy into the audience that you are trying to attract. You should avoid going all in on something that is untested, but make sure that you are flexible enough with your video content strategy to capitalize on new trends when you need to.
The last article we're looking today from wibbitz.com is seven social video trends we are expecting to see more of in 2020. The videos created for social media platforms are going to continue to grow in popularity and usefulness this coming year. The article notes that no matter what level your social video game is at right now, you're going to have plenty of time to start taking advantage of these great video marketing strategies in the years to come.
Number one on their list is video first platforms. On most existing social media sites. Videos rank higher than any other type of posts because they naturally encourage engagement from the viewer. There are now new video driven apps flooding the marketplace like TikTok, Lasso and byte. These are just a few popular examples from the past year alone. As video continues to rank as one of the most important overall digital marketing trends, expect to see even more video platforms emerge and more ways to encourage posting videos on existing social media sites and new ones as well.
Number two on the list is segmented video. Formatting videos optimized to meet the needs of each individual social media network as well as a variety of mobile devices going to continue to be one of the most important video marketing trends in 2020. Platform specific content like square videos for Facebook or Instagram live with their vertical videos enhanced the viewer experience and they stand out visually in their feeds. There are also more likely to enhance engagement numbers and industry leaders are noting that video orientation is going to be important as well. This relates back earlier in this blog where we were talking about with different trends of orientation in video. Ultimately I think the content of the video is going to be more important than anything else, but you still should be thinking about the format of the videos that you are creating and how to best utilize that.
Number three on the list is scaling video production in house video production. Using tools like Wibbitz will continue to be valuable as demand for videos continue to increase on social media sites. You're able to cover hot or trending topics quickly and that's giving brands a leg up and helping them stand out as authority figures amongst their other competitors. Not only is video production scaling going to help create higher volumes of videos, it's also gonna make each video style more uniform and that's going to give users the ability to optimize each piece for multiple platforms.
Number four, targeting infinity groups. Videos that communicate specific messages to segmented markets on the social media platforms is a great way to maximize your marketing and investment. As we continue to monitor social trends in the year 2020 and beyond, incorporating known digital marketing strategies as well as comprehensive video ones is going to continue to be even more important. There is some good news reaching these groups is going to be simpler moving forward, thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, long tail keywords are going to be easier to find and use in your video marketing strategy.
Emphasizing graphic identities, it's no secret that brand image is important in 2020 and beyond. Companies are going to need to take steps forward using video as part of their online graphic identity. Consistent video style through the use of templates is going to be incredibly helpful in this arena and social media trends like this are easy to implement as long as brands continue to harness the power of video marketing as part of their overall content strategy.
Video distribution control is the second to last item on the list, noting that native hosting and embedding videos is going to continue to be an important component of marketing in 2020 because of the average consumers waxing and waning trust in different social media platforms. While these platforms are still hugely popular, marketers should take care to offer their own video content wherever the customer might interact with their brand, for example on their own website just in case.
Finally, and this note also goes back to the previous article we were talking about more one on one communication is going to be incredibly important as well in video marketing in the future. Personalized videos are now being used to facilitate more one on one communication between customers and brands. One-to-One video is going to continue to challenge more traditional quiet client inquiries and support response methods. This is mostly thanks to smartphone video quality, which is going to continue to improve year after year and this is making this one of the hottest video marketing trends to keep an eye on.
These were a couple of interesting video articles that caught my eye today. Hopefully you can take some tips and trends and relate them to your own video marketing strategy. Thanks again for checking out the #trending in video blog. Be sure to check back next time for more tips and trends in the world of video production and beyond. Thanks again.