How Customers Engage With Social Media Video: 8 Things You Need To Know

Want to peek into the mind of your ideal customer and find out how they engage with social media video? How they are interacting with brands via video? How are they purchasing? Take a seat, because in this post we break down exactly how customers are watching social media video and more importantly, how they are purchasing from video. And it’s all based on data and research, so you can start using this intel now, to get results in your business.

So let’s jump in and take a look at the data from a survey of 1,000 (actually 1,017) consumers, thanks to the team at Animoto.

Their annual survey aims to find out how we are interacting with video and brands on social media platforms. You can read last year’s post here to see how we’ve progressed.

In this post we’ll focus on the results of the survey for consumers, because as a business, that’s what you really need to know – so you can create video that resonates with your audience. And be sure to check out the infographic below that breaks it all down visually!

Why Is Social Media Video Important?

Social video, or Social media video is fairly well accepted as an important part of marketing strategy.

In fact, 93% of businesses say they’ve acquired a new customer thanks to a video on social media. That’s a high figure!

And these shopping statistics collated by OptinMonster are also quite thought-provoking:

• 50% of web users look for a video before visiting a store.
• 79% of consumers prefer watching video to reading about a product.
• 43% of consumers want to see more video content this year.

So with this in mind, it’s worth finding out more about how consumers are consuming and buying from video!

8 Things You Need To Know About How Customers Engage With Social Media Video

These are the 8 key learnings about social media video from Animoto’s consumer survey. Let’s start with the obvious:

1. Consumers Heart Video

Yes, it seems obvious, but let’s start here. Consumers love video. it’s their #1 favourite type of branded content on social media.

Let’s break down the figures in order of “love” for different branded content types, according to the survey:

1. Video 45%
2. Photos 22%
3. Links 13%
4. Text 10%
5. N/A 10%

With video being such an important preference for consumers to engage with content, it’s important for businesses to create more video. Make your content visually interesting so it catches attention. Video and live movement is a perfect way to do this, and it’s a perfect way to connect with your audience because it’s highly authentic, and “real”.

2. Think “Virtual Storefront”

One of the most interesting stats to come out of the report was that:

73% of consumers have been impacted by a brand’s social media presence when making a purchase decision.

Also:

33% of consumers check out a brand’s social media presence before checking out their website.

Or, you can look at it this way:

“More and more our presence on social media is becoming the face of our company” – Jason Hsiao, Animoto

So we need to realise that our social media presence is just as important as our website. And it could be the first place that people discover or see you – not on your website. We might follow a brand on Instagram for a while before actually visiting their website to buy something.