Facebook, Video

Facebook Live: Take advantage of going live

Live video marketing has become an extraordinary trend in the online marketing world over the last two years. Thanks to the introduction of Facebook Live, Instagram Live and Livestream for example, brands are working harder than ever to bring educating, fun and interesting live videos to their customers.

What is Facebook Live and why do brands want to use it?

Facebook Live lets people, public figures and Pages share a live video feed with their friends and followers on Facebook, broadcasting to wide audiences. The power of this format is immense and far-reaching. Facebook Live presents a fantastic opportunity for brands to broaden their audience and share their content with the wider world. It also creates the opportunity to:

• Have engaging conversations with followers – Live is the best way to interact with fans in real-time, to answer questions, hear what’s on their minds and gauge responses via Live Reactions
• Reach new audiences in new ways – while current fans are able to keep up with the latest news, Facebook Live allows new followers to discover who they are too
• Connect instantly – Followers can receive notifications, so that when the brand goes live again in the future, they know exactly when to tune in

As we move quickly towards 2018, we have seen more and more brands using this exciting tool and anticipate even higher usage in the coming months with the goal of increasing brand awareness and boosting audience engagement – helping to bring their brand to life on the page.

What does Facebook Live work well for?

• News stories
• Big reveals / brand launches
• Behind the scene events
• Engaging with audiences in new ways

What are the benefits of broadcasting Facebook Live?

• Makes the most of videos on Facebook: Videos are favoured by the Facebook algorithm and lead to great organic reach. In addition, people spend on average 3x more time watching Facebook Live videos than regular video content (Source: Facebook)
• Connects with users in real time: Facebook Live videos are more likely to appear higher in News Feed when live, as brands will be connecting with audiences in real time (Source:Facebook)
• Takes advantage of video tech: Now that Facebook has added live video functionality, fans have more reasons to engage with the brand
• It encourages leads and sales: The conversion element of Facebook Live shouldn’t be underestimated as real-time connection can drive action by presenting offers and enticing discounts
• Can generate ideas for future content: By finding out what audiences like and dislike, content can be repurposed or created based on responses during the broadcast

Technical Requirements:

• Broadcasting content on Facebook requires video encoding software or hardware that supports real time streaming protocols (rtmps)
• Getting Facebook Live up and running will need dedicated technical resource from your social media agency as well as a lot of planning prior to the broadcast

Top Tip: Facebook has introduced scheduling for live videos which means that fans can subscribe to the feed in advance and therefore build audiences proactively.

Community Support:

• Facebook Live is a huge opportunity for brands to interact with fans in new ways; by directly responding to comments in real time, customer service can be optimised
• Successful management of Facebook Live events requires dedicated community management to monitor feeds and engage with fans

Top Tip: Direct moderation of Facebook Live content is an opportunity to reinforce value propositions; this should be reflected in the campaign strategy in order to maximise potential.

Final Tips from us:

• Live doesn’t have to be ‘Live’ – it’s possible to broadcast pre-recorded content with Facebook Live
• Geo-target specific audiences or locations to fine-tune your targeting
• Tie it in with other marketing activities to boost impact

If you need technical expertise or want to find out how to take your social offering to the next level, contact us at agency:2 on 0203 567 1380.

We are a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA Winner!

 

agency:2 is thrilled to be ranked the 144^th fastest growing tech companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). We would like to thank our amazing clients and hard-working team for helping us to achieve this fantastic recognition by Deloitte.

The Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ EMEA award is a prestigious acknowledgement of the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and energy tech companies across EMEA.

“Innovation is more than technological advancement; it’s also a state of mind,” said Paul Sallomi, vice chairman at Deloitte LLP and global technology, media and telecommunications industry leader. “The winners of the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 program in EMEA recognize that this new type of thinking is essential for business success. We look forward to your continued leadership in introducing new tools that can enhance the personal lives of consumers, and drive growth for companies worldwide.”

Joel Davis co-founder of agency:2 commented on another great achievement. “We’re excited to be placed alongside the most innovative and fastest growing companies in EMEA as it’s a real compliment to our team. To also be recognised as the 3^rd fastest growing company in the UK media sector is an incredible testament to our ability to deliver game-changing results for our clients and a recognition of our drive for achieving innovation in social media marketing. I’m immensely proud of everyone at agency:2.”

About agency:2

agency:2 is an award-winning social media agency powered by audience insight technology. Our leading social media advertising technologies and expertise enable us to deliver results that far exceed expectations. As innovators for the social ad industry, we work with world leading brands such as Barbie, Worldpay and Sony to deliver the best social media results.

 

 

Additional resources

Learn more about agency:2 here: www.agency2.co.uk

Learn more about our Social Insight Engine technology: www.socialinsightengine.com

Contact Joel Davis: 00 44 (0)203 567 1381

Discover how to supercharge your Facebook marketing with videos

Supercharge your Facebook marketing with videos

We all know videos obtain high organic reach and boost the reach of Facebook marketing campaigns significantly. But is that the case for all video content?

What can we do to improve the reach of the videos we post to achieve better results for our social media campaigns? Here are our top 4 tips for making videos work on Facebook.

 

1 – The content must be easily shareable

Videos should inspire sharing; either by tagging friends or sharing the content on newsfeeds. This will occur only if fans find a video useful, interesting or ‘cute’. Shareability is a key component for increasing Facebook reach.

As getting Facebook users to ‘click to play’ a video is rare, the message should be transmittable without sound. Thus, subtitles are extremely useful or animated text within the video is also effective.

 

2 – The video must be short and catchy from the start

Users of Facebook typically scroll through their newsfeeds and don’t spend a lot of time on any one piece of content; retaining audience attention for longer than 30 seconds for an advert is challenging to say the least!

Additionally, attention spans tend to be shorter on mobile, so story-telling should ideally be told ‘back to front’, revealing the key message in the opening 3-6 seconds. That way a user can see the beginning of a video only and extract what they need without watching to the end.

 

3 – Offer fans an immersive experience

Even though you may have caught a user’s attention, keeping that attention can be challenging.

In order to retain your audience, showing videos that are quick and original, contain smart video editing, and / or tell a story can accomplish this. The video has to give something back to the user such as: relevant knowledge, an emotional feeling, an explanation or a sense of community.

 

4 The message must speak to a specific audience and build on the power of targeting

A message resonates best when it is told to a clearly identified subset of the target audience. Establishing a feeling of affinity within this subset will allow the audience to then be expanded via advert targeting abilities.

For example, if the message of the video is geared towards mums of infants using emotional content, then tailoring this content specifically to this audience will improve its relevancy. The video’s likeliness to go viral will also then increase, as that audience is much more likely to share the content, and so on, and so on.

 

5 Need to increase traffic and conversion rates? add a call to action button

If you follow the steps above, you will generally find your cost per view decreasing and your view-through-rate increasing. In addition, the videos can then also be very suitable to drive traffic and conversion by adding a call-to-action button. Facebook has recently changed the CTA button placement for videos, making it visible at all times – as a result, we have seen CTRs increase from 0.01% up to 3.95%. It seems the days where video can only be used for generating awareness are in the past – at least on Facebook.

 

agency:2 has been working with video content across global brands for years; we believe in the power of this type of content for successful Facebook marketing and anticipate seeing videos grow rapidly in use over time.

Facebook moves closer to being a full-fledged Periscope competitor!

Yesterday Facebook announced a dedicated video space on its mobile app in the hope that brands and consumers will broadcast and watch more videos live.

With Facebook Live you can use your phone to share a moment instantly with friends, family, colleagues, consumers and fans all over the world.

So how will this help Brands as well as consumers?

agency:2 believe live video will transform the relationship between brands and their consumers. The power of Facebook Live is colossal, with endless opportunities for brands to capture the here and now.

It will allow brands to promote their products and services by broadcasting a live stream, to tap into the consumer’s emotional and psychological motivations.

We’ve compiled a small list of how we see brands adopting Facebook Live in the future:

• New product launches and demos
• Consumer video testimonials
• Live international sporting events
• Fashion catwalks
• Property viewings
• 360 views inside retailers shops
• Holiday destinations and hotels
• Live showcase events
• Live corporate conventions and exhibitions

We’d love to hear your opinions on how your brand will be adopting Facebook Live streaming.

The Power of Video in Social Media

Mobile video is set to become a key investment opportunity in 2016 due to the high promise it offers; we have seen video budgets increase by over 18% since 2014.  (Source: aol.platforms)

The following chart highlights how different social networks have adopted video promotional content in the last year and how they plan to run video campaigns in the forthcoming year.

 

 

Source: Mixpo Survey – 2015

 

You can see from the data, it is predicted that advertisers plan to run video ads on Facebook more than on any other networks.

According to a report by Cisco, video will account for over 80% of global Internet traffic by 2019.

With online video quickly becoming key towards social media users obtaining information and fulfilling entertainment needs, our social display media planners at agency:2 are of the opinion that businesses failing to include video in their marketing strategies correctly will do so at their peril.

When it comes to potential reach, video is unrivaled. Will your marketing strategy include more video content in 2016?

Top 5 video seeding tips

People often refer to the term ‘viral video’. However, without video seeding and organic growth all you have is a video – it is the seeding and sharing that make a video ‘go viral’ / reach its potential.

This means that ‘video seeding’ should be an integral part of an online video campaign.  A successful seeding campaign, which is fully integrated across your entire brand’s marketing activity, will get your content seen on social channels and plant it across the web, ensuring it gets in front of as many of the (right) people as possible.

A critical element of any online video campaign is, of course, creating a great piece of content; one that is as ‘watchable’ as possible. There are a number of key considerations. Think about the length of the video (ideally it shouldn’t be over 2 minutes) and understand the intended aim of your video and set out clearly defined KPIs so that you can measure its success. Most importantly, make sure you have created a video that is compelling enough for your fans to want to watch and share with their friends. By completing this check list of online video best practice you’ll be the ideal position to launch your seeding campaign.

Here are our top 5 essential steps to give your video the very best chance of success:

1.       Optimise the videos for search

Whether you’re hosting your video on YouTube, Vimeo, MetaCafe or another video site it is crucial to optimise it for search in order to maximise the number of video views.

YouTube, for example relies on three key signals when ranking your videos within the YouTube search results:

• Keywords in your title and description
• Number of video views
• Video ratings

It is crucial to think about what keywords you use in the titles and descriptions when uploading your video. At the outset you must carry out keyword research in order to uncover niches in the targeted terms.  Use your brand insights to decide upon your keywords in your title, description and tags and ensure each is fully optimised. Here’s a checklist to ensure your videos are fully optimised:

Title:  The title is very important to SEO. Make sure it grabs the attention of your target audience and use high volume keywords. You have 99 characters to optimise your title text so search engines can easily categorise it and your audience can find it. Think carefully about your target keywords, as well as any other keywords you may want to rank for, and choose a title that is popular enough to drive viewer numbers. Another important factor to remember is that before you even upload the video you need to optimise the file name of the video using your keywords.

Description:  The video description should explain exactly what is being shown in the video. You have 5,000 characters in which to describe your video (though keep in mind only about 25-30 characters will be visible in your YouTube search results) and optimise it for key terms. The YouTube Creator Playbook advises putting the most “compelling” information at the beginning. It’s important to avoid key word stuffing, however you must also make it as easy as possible for search engines to find your content – getting this balance right is crucial.

Tags: Tagging your videos allows you to choose a range of words or phrases that will help search engines and your audience to find your video. The key to using tags effectively is to choose unique keyword phrases that you think people would use to search for your video. As a rule of thumb around 5-10 tags for each video is best practice. One tip that may also prove useful is to include any misspellings of your brand name.

2.       Use social bookmarking tools

Submitting your videos to social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon is an extremely useful way to set in motion your video seeding campaign. During the initial launch of the campaign these sites can help to drive increased traffic to your videos.

Submitting to these sites will also help your video get indexed faster and will help to optimise your video by providing additional inbound links and improving video search engine ranking.

However, as a brand you must be extremely careful how you promote your video. If the audience think that you are simply pushing out a video while offering no value this may be seen as spamming and could result in a backlash from online users.  One way of avoiding this is to use Reddit’s sponsored links, which allows brands to upload content while avoiding accusations of spamming.

3.       Maximise organic growth

For brands social media is all about creating compelling content that has great viral potential, content that fans want to talk about and share. The more creative and innovative you can be the more inclined your audience will be to share your content and engage with the brand.

Make use of the viral nature of social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+, as well as leveraging your other marketing channels such as your website and newsletters. By creating an integrated strategic marketing approach and optimising all of your channels will greatly increase the exposure of your video.

This will also bring with it optimisation benefits. Google use the number of links to your video to determine its position in the search rankings, so by encouraging people to share your videos across the social web you will also boost your SEO results.

4.       Use advertising

While organic growth and manual seeding are powerful ways to boost the number of views your video receives social advertising is also an extremely effective way to reach specific audience groups.

Strategic advertising can be run on video sharing channels themselves such as YouTube who offer a range of options, such as promoted videos as well as ‘InVideo Ads’.

Facebook’s advertising platform also offers a powerful and highly targeted way to promote your video. With the ability to target by age, sex, location and also by interests it provides an invaluable way to promote and drive traffic to your video channel.

For more information on video advertising visit http://www.socialadteam.org/

5.       Blogger outreach

Blogger outreach is another extremely effective strategy when running an online video campaign. Working with prominent bloggers you can connect with targeted groups of consumers who you know are interested in your offering and are receptive to your messages – this will guarantee your brand word of mouth recommendations across key communities.

With access to influential, relevant and trusted influencers you will be able to successfully drive traffic to your video and leverage the passion and enthusiasm of the target audience and amplify the reach of your video.

Optimisation + great content

‘Optimisation’ is key when it comes to video seeding. When you have uploaded your video you must optimise the key words so that search engines can easily find it. Then, in order to optimise the reach of your video, you must use social advertising and social bookmarks. Finally you must optimise the power of your message by leveraging trusted influencers on blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

It is worth exploring YouTubes showcase ideas to inspire new ways to engage within video apps.  https://www.youtube.com/yt/dev/en-GB/showcase.html

These tactics will help to maximise the chances of your video being seen by as many people as possible – and are key to helping videos reach their potential. However, it’s also vital to keep in mind campaign effectiveness will be limited unless you have a great piece of video content which people want to share and engage with in the first place.

So, when launching your video, remember that it requires the perfect combination of great content, measurable objectives, a comprehensive seeding strategy together with continuous optimisation. Only then are you giving it the very best chance to go ‘viral’.

Social TV: One to watch?

TV is inherently social; shows have been weekly appointments to gather around the screen and it is a small step from watching a show to telling friends or blogging what we think about it.  The proliferation of second screen devices means viewers are able to explore, share and engage with content before, during and after the screening event – and in so doing become users or even contributors.

We are talking about fundamental changes to how programme makers, advertisers and viewers connect, moving from a shout media model to an interactive one.  Specifically, developments are in content –  how programmes are broadcast and created;  in discovery – how we find new shows to watch or information about on screen products; in engagement – amplifying conversations around particular shows or products; and in integration – multi-platform screens and apps.

What this all adds up to is the opportunity for fully integrated campaigns across broadcast, digital, print, outdoor and social media.  With the technology and hardware in place brands are starting to create responses that capitalise on diversified touchpoints – but are campaigns reaching their potential?

NBCUniversal’s Telemundo Media premiered their Spanish language drama ‘Relaciones Peligrosas’ that connects with twitter fans to develop the on screen narrative – a slow burn in terms of social media engagement, the real pay off will come as this new show gains momentum.

Coca Cola’s campaign for Superbowl XVLI (with viewing figures of 111 million) involved their polar bear characters hosting a virtual party and interacting in real time with fans via facebook and twitter – a victim of its own success as the facebook app crashed the website, creative content was less impressive leading it to list on polls for the worst Superbowl ad.

Honda’s Jazz car campaign in 2011 is an example of augmented TV allowing viewers to grab characters from the ad by swiping their iphones in front of the screen – a fun idea, well delivered, but the numbers show an incomplete return on investment with YouTube hits at 200,000 after one year (100,000 of which achieved in the first 2 weeks).

Marks & Spencer have launched an app for Samsung smart TVs with advice and buying tools across its product range, although online shopping does not feature – an example of early adoption, possibly too early adoption as the obvious shopping function is not enabled.

Sky UK are working with Zeebox to integrate their TV schedule and content into the app that syncs to Facebook and Twitter to create a social media TV companion – and rolled out during Sky UK’s Premiership Football coverage on 3 March 2012.  This tie in offers a powerful all in one solution that knows what viewers are watching, shows them what their friends are watching and provide links to shop for products and download.

Social TV has great potential for brands to enliven the conversation that they have with consumers, to engage with a light, playful touch and to build mass communities around their products and services.  And the building blocks are accessible, so even smaller budgets can get cut through and benefit from longer touchpoints.

By Rachel Moses

YouTube’s new social-friendly design goes live

With the launch of Google+ the search engine giant has been taking steps to more closely integrate its platforms – and this has now extended to YouTube.

Last week they announced a new design of their video platform and this week it was rolled out to certain users. The revamped design features a new look and places a much larger emphasis on social integration.

The look and feel includes an updated sleeker design which is less cluttered and also easier to navigate. YouTube may be the biggest video sharing platform on the web but its design has never been the most appealing, especially compared to other video sites such as Vimeo. This new design goes a long way to improving this. The design also provides users with more sizing options for their videos and also makes recommended content ‘pop out’ when clicked.

The greatest change, however, is the deep Google+ integration. When logged into Google all the subscriptions and channels you follow are organised into a left sidebar, which makes it easier to see videos that are shared from people within your social circles on Google+. This means it’s simple to watch videos that people who you trust have recommended. There are also recommended content category sections tailored to your needs.

This is a smart move by Google, providing users with a personalised service and integrating their services – and in the long term it should see Google+ grow their user numbers.

How to enable the new design

The new design is currently being rolled out in phases to certain users and will not be available to all video users for a few weeks. However, there is a way you can start using the new design right now.

It’s relatively simple to do and will only take a couple of minutes. When you’re on the YouTube website, you need to open up your browser’s developer tools — Ctrl / Cmd + Shift + K in Firefox; Ctrl + Shift + J (Win) or Cmd + Alt + J (Mac) for Chrome — and input the following code. Alternatively to put it more simply – right click on your mouse, in the pop up box click on ‘Inspect Element’ then click on the ‘Console tab’ and copy paste in the line of code:

document.cookie=”VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=ST1Ti53r4fU”;

Close the pop up box, reload the site and you should then be viewing the brand new YouTube design.