If you haven’t started integrated video ads into your social media strategy then it’s time to start. Whether you’re in B2C or B2B, 2017 is shaping up to be all about video marketing.
Video marketing can appear as complex because of the various platform offerings, across a growing range of devices, and the amount of work and time required to produced one video. At the same time, advertisers are seeing great results with this kind of content.
- 79% of consumers would rather watch a video to learn about a product, than read text on a page (Wyzowl)
- 60% of marketers used videos in their social media marketing in 2016 (Social Media Examiner)
- Online videos will account for more than 80% of all consumer internet traffic by 2020 (CISCO)
- 84% of consumers have been convinced to make a purchase after watching a brand’s video (Wyzowl)
We recently concluded a multi-channel video ads campaign on Facebook and Twitter. This blog will walk you through the campaign’s results and learnings.
Facebook And Twitter Campaign Overview
The purpose of this campaign was to generate and increase awareness of the a product and it’s benefits through a video campaign across desktop and mobile devices. To accomplish this objective we targeted a highly relevant audience with Facebook and Twitter video view ads. Across the platforms, our goal was to max out CPV giving priority to the most efficient placements.
Our primary metric was 100% video views with a secondary engagement rate goal (social shares, comments, likes, and followers). We ran the same 30 second video on Facebook and Twitter with similar targeting on each platform.
Our budget focused on Facebook video view ads since it’s rated as the most impactful social channel for video — 8.4X higher than any other social channel (Animoto). Twitter received 15% of the budget since videos on their network drive the highest recall and emotional connection on any digital platform (Twitter).
Our target audience were people who interested in tech, IoT, connected devices, smart homes and home automation excluding platform followers of the brand. We decided not to use Youtube video ads, due to our target audience, the company’s lack of brand presence on the platform, and our goal of watching the ad to completion. YouTube also just announced they will “no longer support 30-second video ads that users can’t skip, starting in 2018.”
Why Facebook?
First of all the brand’s audience lives on this platform. And with Facebook giving video priority in the News Feed, users are consuming more video than ever. In fact, Facebook users watch an average of 100 million hours of video on mobile every day, and daily views have increased from 1 billion to 8 billion in one year’s time (Techcrunch).
Why Twitter?
If you scroll through your Twitter feed, you’ll see a few videos, but not as many as you’d find on Facebook or Instagram. Clickz reported, videos are 6x more likely to be retweeted than photos and 3x more likely than GIFs. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people who don’t see any value in sharing videos on Twitter, and that’s a huge mistake, because 82% of users watch video on Twitter.
Twitter in conjunction with Omnicom Media Group recently conducted a study measuring the brain activity of Twitter users as they browsed their timelines and responded to different media – with video being the specific focus. They found that “shorter videos of 15 seconds or less are more likely than videos of 30 seconds to drive memory encoding.”
The findings underline that video clearly has a place on Twitter, and that Twitter users are receptive to it.
Campaign Assumptions
While this campaign targeted desktop and mobile users, we knew the results were going to skew toward mobile devices based on our research.We also assumed the video would need a strong hook in the beginning grab attention and contain subtitles as people are watch increasingly watching video without sound.
- 65% of people who watch the first three seconds of a Facebook video will watch for at least 10 seconds, and 45% will watch for 30 seconds (Facebook)
- 93% of Twitter videos are watched on mobile (Twitter)
- 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound (Digiday)
Comparing Facebook To Twitter: Video Views
First, let’s define what a video is on each network. For Facebook, A “video view” is defined as a view of 3 seconds or more and will appear for all videos, including those that come to life as people scroll through News Feed.
On Twitter, 3s/100% views only count when your video is watched in 100% view for 3 seconds or more, or when a user clicks to expand/unmute your video. That’s key because if you select per video view then it’s only 2 seconds or more at 50% viewability. Make sure you select 3s/100% for the most accurate and reliable video views.
Remember our goal to have our target audience to watch 100% of the video so we’re going to share our results based on that metric.
Facebook’s video ad completion rate dominated Twitter’s. With 32% of the audience completing the video on Facebook compared to only 2% on Twitter.
Twitter’s cost per video completion (CPCV) was nearly 12x higher than Facebook’s. On Twitter it cost $0.47 per completed view compared to Facebook’s $0.04.
Let’s review how far each channel’s audience made it through the video. On Facebook 50% of the audience made it to the 25% compared to 16% on Twitter. That’s the highlight for Twitter as the video completion rates only decrease whereas Facebook’s nearly level off after the 50% completion mark. Meaning, if someone made it past the 50% point they were highly likely to complete the entire video.
Comparing Facebook To Twitter: Engagement Rates
Facebook engagement includes any action that was recorded and attributed to your ads. It is a sum of engagement actions (such as post reactions, link clicks, shares and comments).
Engagement rate on Twitter is calculated by taking the total of tweet engagements divided by impressions. And engagements are considered all clicks on your tweet, including retweets, replies, likes, and hashtag clicks. This includes earned clicks that you’re not billed for.
When it came to engagement rate, Facebook continued to outshine Twitter by generating 10x more engagement than Twitter.
Key Learnings
Facebook continues to provide the ability to target highly relevant audiences and show them ads they’re more likely to engage with. With this campaign they also generated very low cost video views and a high video completion rate. We were also surprised that nearly 1/3 of the audience completed the 30 second video signaling that people are willing to engage with longer videos on Facebook.
Twitter’s audience targeting isn’t nearly as sophisticated as Facebook’s, which could be why we saw lower video completion rates and higher cost per video completion. It does appear that longer videos are well suited on Twitter as their audience moves quicker through their Feed. It would be worth testing shorter videos (less than 10 seconds) with a sound-off strategy in mind.
Conclusion
Social media video ads are definitely the cool kid on the block that everyone wants to be. We hope these findings encourage you to experiment with video ads for your company.
Are you already running social media video ads? Are you similar results? Let me know by reaching out on Twitter, @jdprater. I look forward to hearing from you!
