By Dave Chambers 

Marketing experts agree that video is the most important trend for the 2020s.  

Video is by far the most popular way for consumers to learn about new products. If you’re not creating videos, it’s time to include them in your marketing strategy. It’s easy: All you need is a smartphone.

Consider this persuasive data about video content on websites and social media platforms:

1. Look at the numbers

It’s estimated that consumers will spend more time watching online video over the next few years than ever and more advertisers are investing in online video ads to drive engagement.

70 percent of consumers say they have shared a brand’s video.

52 percent of consumers say watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchasing decisions.

65 percent of executives visit marketers’ websites and 39 percent call a vendor after watching a video.

By 2022, 82 percent of all online content will be video. The growth of mobile video advertising is expected to be more than three times larger than nonmobile video advertising by 2024. These statistics clearly show the importance of video to stay relevant in today’s marketplace. 

If your website includes video, it’s 50 times more likely to drive search results compared with text because people find video more compelling and Google places pages that include videos higher in its rankings.  

2. Social media video content is highly effective

Video is one of the most engaging forms of content.  Long-form and short-form videos are among the most shared on social media. 

The growing shift to mobile devices has seen marketing newsletters and e-blasts slowly fade because they’re too difficult to read on small mobile screens. Video, however, can give consumers the same information in a quick, easy-to-use format that works perfectly on any device.

You have several options using video to engage your audience on social media. With your smartphone, you can produce a video post or start a live broadcast on Facebook, YouTube or Instagram.

With more than 2.4 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide. Nearly 60 percent of users visited a brand’s Facebook page before visiting its website in 2019. 

YouTube placed second with 2 billion users and was the No. 1 platform influencing how consumers discovered and researched new products last year.  

Instagram, with 1 billion users, might be regarded as the top platform for influencers. But the new video social media site TikTok is very popular with younger consumers and has overtaken Instagram with more than 1.5 billion users. Both platforms have a major impact on how consumers receive information about their favorite brands.

Statistics show that shorter videos are best. Online videos shorter than one minute had a completion rate of 68 percent last year, compared with a 25 percent completion rate of videos longer than 20 minutes.

3. Storytelling with video content

How can you tell your story on social media? Start by using features such as Stories on YouTube and Instagram for your social media content. Stories focus on storytelling and allow you to use photos, video, text, emojis and hashtags to create long and short content.

Facebook and Instagram are pushing brands to produce video content through Stories, in part because Stories often get more clicks than traditional News Feed posts. More than 500 million people use Instagram Stories daily. One in four consumers made a purchase after seeing an Instagram story last year. Users spend 24 to 32 minutes a day watching Instagram Stories. More than 150 million people use Facebook Stories daily and Twitter has recently launched its own take on Stories with “Fleets.”

Using stories on social media to share your video content is an excellent opportunity for marketers to advertise their brands and engage with millions of consumers every day. 

Whether it’s short videos, such as those popular on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram Stories, or long content found on YouTube, videos are the future of social media.  Videos will dominate social media. Organizations and brands can’t afford to miss this opportunity to reach consumers.

Dave Chambers is a multimedia specialist at Hook PR & Marketing (www.hookpr.com).