Customer Experience

By Liam Dowd - March 19th, 2014

News site referral data, how video is top for content sharing, and who are your brand influencers?

Brand video views increase 7,000%

ContentedLondon have created a new video that integrates all of the latest stats that conclude that video continues to be the most powerful form of content any corporation can deliver across social media. Video content is 12 times more engaging than its textual counterparts, with the 25-54 age group being the most active when sharing this type of content with their networks.

The type of video content your corporation is creating is also important to get right. According to Animoto instructional videos (67%) are the most shared with product and service videos (64%) and humorous videos (64%) coming in second and third. Also, where video is shared is important with YouTube not surprisingly coming out on top, as this platform outperforms Facebook with this content.

With nearly two-thirds of consumers considering companies that produce videos more trustworthy, and three-quarters considering video the premiere way for brands to engage with their customers, all corporations need a video strategy now.

And is this the perfect business/product video ever produced?

Who are your brand influencers?

According to a new report from Augure has revealed that businesses find it difficult to identify the key influencers of their brands. Lisa Barone, VP of strategy at Overit says: “Having a large following doesn’t necessarily mean you’re influential or that you can inspire people to actually do something.”

The participants in the survey see email (66%) as the main contact point for the influencers they have identified. Twitter comes in second with 57% with Facebook at 29% and Google+ bringing up the rear at just 6%.

What is clear is that influencers have a great deal of power especially across key social media networks. Developing close brand advocacy with these groups and individuals is a vital component of any marketing campaign.

Allocating resources to identify the key influencers across your corporation’s brand assets must be a fundamental component of every campaign. Email may still be the preferred initial contact channel, but social media is fast overtaking this method.

Direct contact more valuable to news sites than social referrals

Research from Pew into how valuable a visitor is when referred to a news site via social media, has discovered that a direct relationship (when someone actually typed in the news channel’s URL) spends three-times more time on these sites than those that arrive via social media. Of course using search will usually lead to the story that is being searched for. Whereas, a direct visit will often lead to more linger time, as the visitor is browsing.

Pew states: “This higher level of engagement from direct visitors holds true across the full mix of sites studied, from those that rank among the most shared on Facebook, such as breitbart.com, to those whose traffic is heavily driven by traffic from search engines, such as abcnews.go.com (the website for ABC News); and from those with a small total audience (mrconservative.com) to aggregators (yahoonews.com).  Even sites such as digital native buzzfeed.com and National Public Radio’s npr.org, which have an unusually high level of Facebook traffic, saw much greater engagement from those who came in directly.

“The data also suggest that converting social media or search eyeballs to dedicated readers is difficult to do. Most people that arrived at one of these popular news sites used only one of the three modes – suggesting that, at least on desktop/laptops, individuals tend to come to these news sites using a single method.”

News has always been a main source of traffic across the Internet. Corporations that have news content must pay close attention to how their traffic is being directed. Social media certainly has its place, but clearly the relationship between social media based news discovery and direct site access is much more complex than it appears to be.

Understanding social media analytics

The SXSW Interactive Festival included masses of information that all corporations could learn from. One area that came under close scrutiny was the use of analytics. Social media analytics can help you understand the active members of your social media audience, but what about the people who aren't posting? How do you fill in the gaps in your analytics with insight into your customers' purchases, your fans' offline interests, or your users' reasons for liking what they like?