19.1: Introduction

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Video offers an extremely rich, engaging and stimulating experience for viewers. With the increased availability of bandwidth and improvements in video technology, people have started watching and sharing videos on a scale never seen before. From music videos to funny clips of animals to reviews, how-tos, exciting commercials, and movie trailers, users are turning to video for entertainment, information, and education.

According to HubSpot (2016), the most popular forms of online video content are:

Comedy (39% of users)
Music (31%)
News (33%).

In September 2017, Google was the world’s largest desktop search engine, with a 91% global market share (Statcounter, 2017). Arguably the second largest search engine was YouTube, the popular video-sharing website (and third most visited website on the web). YouTube boasts over 1 billion unique users (YouTube, 2017). This indicates that users are turning to YouTube with precise, intent-driven behaviour, they’re not just browsing randomly or waiting for a link to land in their inbox.

With more and more users using search engines to find video content, understanding how to create and optimise videos for search is an important part of any digital strategy.

Every day, about 1 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube, more than half of which come from mobile devices, while every minute, 400 hours of video are uploaded (Expanded Ramblings, 2017). Other social media sites are getting in on the video action as well. By the end of 2016, Facebook was responsible for more than 3.8 billion video views per day, though there is a little uncertainty about what counts as a video view. Videos uploaded directly to Facebook have ten times more reach than shared YouTube links (Mediakix, 2017; Adelie Studios, 2016).

The introduction of live video such as Facebook Live and Periscope has also changed the video game – users spend three times longer, in total, watching Facebook Live video than they do pre-recorded video (Hootsuite, 2017).

Videos can come from anyone, and from anywhere. Small videos can experience massive global reach, as was the case with the popular Charlie Bit My Finger video, which had accumulated more than 854 million views as of October 2017.

Brands use video-sharing platforms to connect with their customers, who are increasingly interacting with brands by creating opinion videos, parodies and responses. Individuals have the power to market themselves, their ideas, who they are and what they do. Video content helps you connect with your audience, creating an experience and encouraging engagement.