The invention of the internet spawned a whole new range of new ways for us to communicate and interact with each other. Along with the internet came blogs, social media platforms, apps, video streaming, online news, and video-sharing websites such as YouTube.
The advent of the smartphone has allowed billions of people to easily create, upload and share video content instantly.
As technology has improved, shooting video and sharing it has become simpler, cheaper and faster. This is why we keep seeing increases in how much video content is uploaded and consumed. In fact, it’s estimated that over 3.4 million video clips are being consumed on YouTube every minute1!
Increasingly, organisations and experts are turning to video as an important method to share information. Video has become a major vehicle for communicating information. There’s no denying the power of video to influence. Videos can be easily shared, too: spreading information far and wide.
Every minute, over 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.
Source: Statista
Why is video so popular?
- Video can be produced quickly and cheaply.
- Anyone with access to a smartphone and an internet connection can produce and share video content.
- It’s fast and easy to share videos with other people (via email, social media, websites).
- Video is engaging: we love watching videos.
- Videos can be faster and easier to consume than other forms of communication, such as reading text alone.
- Visual, so is a great media to show body language and to explain concepts that can be difficult to articulate in written words only.
- After Google, YouTube is the second most popular search engine2.
- Having video content on your website improves search rankings in Google: making it more likely that your organisation will be found via Google search if you have video content on your website. Google owns YouTube, which is another reason for YouTube videos to be preferred in Google search results.
- The phenomenon of parasocial relationships and interactions help explain the popularity of video3: whereby we tend to feel a bond with the people we watch in videos. This increases our engagement.
Video is a core component of a content marketing strategy
Content marketing is a dominant form of marketing that involves producing valuable, free content for potential students/clients/collaborators. The idea is that by sharing information that is of value to people, they will see you as a person or organisation who is knowledgable in your field and in time, they may decide to engage with you.
Coupled with the fact that video content ranks more highly on Google, video is therefore a key part of many organisation’s marketing strategies.
What about video consumption in the future?
It is widely predicted that video consumption will continue to increase in the future4.
There are no signs of video content reducing in popularity, so it is worth learning more about it so you can harness it and use it to share your knowledge with more people.