Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Whether it be the “year of mobile” to the “year of RLSA,” there is always another trend to consider investing heavily in.

Over the last year-plus, video has been most frequently cited as the new digital frontier. Whether it’s important to a comprehensive marketing campaign isn’t the question, though. The question is, how do we best make use of it?

In this post, we’ll talk about when – and how – to put video in play for your marketing campaigns....

Mark Zuckerberg said at the end of 2015 that we would be in the "Golden Age of Video" for some five years. So... it's not over yet, and business owners' and marketers' growing access to video will only further the shift in our social feeds in 2017.

We should also expect to see changes in the way users engage with content on social channels; an influx of new media formats, including 360-degree video, live video, and virtual reality; and new marketing tactics as brands experiment with these new formats. Finally, we'll also start to see more automated ads and personalized ads targeting our screens as such new technologies make their way into the hands of more and more marketers.

Here are seven predictions for the social media and video marketing landscape in 2017....

Video can be a great addition to your landing page, but it doesn’t have to stop there. Video is also a nice way to get more out of your social media efforts.

This has become increasingly important as consumers have come to expect a presence from brands and businesses on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social platforms. Today’s article is the first in a series of blog posts that will dive into how to use social video to drive engagement, drive sales, and establish expertise.

According to Buffer, “video is largely underutilized” on Facebook. After analyzing more than 16 million social media posts, Buffer concluded that video gets a lot more engagement than other types of posts, including photos, links, and plain text posts....

As a marketer, you are probably already aware that images are important. They're easier to digest than a bunch of words on a page and can help support your other content by telling a story in ways that words cannot. Whether in social media posts or in blog posts, images help your audience to better understand what you are talking about, plain and simple.

Cinemagraphs can take things a step further.

What is a cinemagraph, you ask? The artists over at Cinemagraph.com – where the cinemagraph was essentially born – describe them as "an image that contains within itself a living moment that allows a glimpse of time to be experienced and preserved endlessly.

"In plain English, a cinemagraph is really just a fancy GIF – a file format often used to create short, infinitely-looping animations for the web. Check out the example below....

You see, live streaming is an important element to your digital marketing plan. If your goal is to improve your lead and sales conversion rates, expand your reach, and enrich follower experience, live streaming video is the tool to use.

There are several options available to execute your live video marketing strategy. Check out these five popular platforms and determine which one(s) are best for your brand and audience

More than 62% of the world's internet users will view digital video in 2017, up from 60.8% in 2016. Digital video viewership's uptake has primarily occurred in developed markets such as the US, Canada and the UK, where internet infrastructure can meet the bandwidth demands of digital video. Strong internet speeds enable consumers to watch entire TV programs online through over-the-top (OTT) services and share videos via social media channels.

eMarketer projects the share of global internet users who watch digital video will increase marginally to 63.4% in 2020. While this growth is small, the consumers who view video will spend more time watching content.

Digital video viewership worldwide has recorded double-digit increases annually since 2013, but 2017 will mark the first year in which growth will fall to single-digit rates, at 8.2%. Developing markets such as India, Indonesia and the Middle East and Africa lag behind by this measure due to a lack of infrastructure that can provide access to mobile and household broadband....

In 2017, content will continue to be one of the most important marketing tactics for ecommerce businesses. Look for content marketers to produce a greater number of videos, focus on mobile media consumption, spend more money promoting content, produce more shows rather than standalone posts, and use technology to an advantage.

Content marketing is the act of creating, distributing, and promoting content, such as blog posts, articles, podcasts, and videos with the aim of attracting, engaging, and retaining customers. For ecommerce marketers, content can be a way of building a relationship with a shopper, which in turn will allow an online store to compete not on price or delivery speed, but on experience.

What follows are five trends that could impact content marketing in 2017....

On-the-job training, vocational training, or academic courses can all involve helping learners understand complex information. The scale of the challenge is often amplified by the fact that complex information is expressed using terminology that our learners aren't familiar with, terminology that tends to confuse rather than aid learners.

Here is how to use microlearning and video to make the complex simple by applying these 6 tips to your Instructional Design.

1. Show Before Tell

You can use video to show learners a working example of a complex process, network, or product (or parts of it) before they are expected to understand or figure out how it works or how to build it. By doing this first, learners will have a frame of reference to support their understanding of the constituent parts....

Vine will not be an infinite loop.

It was four years ago this month when Twitter bought Vine for a reported $30 million, but now the relationship has fully withered. On a Medium blog post, Twitter revealed that it's shutting down the looping video app in the coming weeks.

"You'll be able to access and download your Vines," the post read. "We'll be keeping the website online because we think it's important to still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that have been made. You will be notified before we make any changes to the app or website."

How long the Vine videos will live on the website is unknown, but creation of the mobile app's six-second clips has already been halted. It's a fairly surprising move....