Why Video Is The Social Media Trend Of 2016
Artists take note, a recent review of the statistics reveals that social video on both Facebook and YouTube has blown up in the past year, and will likely only become even more popular moving forward into 2016.
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Guest Post by Kendall Walters of Hootsuite
Video isn’t just an important part of the online experience; increasingly, video is the internet. Social video has exploded in the past year and we see no reason that it won’t continue to grow exponentially.
According to a report by Cisco, by 2019:
Video will account for 80 percent of global internet traffic
Nearly a million minutes of video will be shared every second
It would take an individual 5 million years to watch the all the video that will be shared each month
While the overall stats are impressive, we’re also paying attention to the staggering numbers that several of the top contenders for social video supremacy are reporting.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced at the company’s third-quarter earnings call that Facebook is generating 8 billion video views per day. Yup, you read that right. Eight. Billion. And that’s not all.
According to data from Facebook:
The number of video posts per person has increased 75 percent globally and 94 percent in the U.S.
The amount of video from people and brands in News Feed has increased 3.6 times year-over-year
More than 50 percent of people who visit Facebook in the U.S. every day watch at least one video
Snapchat isn’t far behind. According to the Financial Times, the ephemeral messaging platform says they’re receiving 6 billion daily video views—that’s three times what the figure was in May, a mere six months ago.
And let’s not forget the platform that started the social video craze: YouTube. While it’s no longer the undisputed leader, the video-focused site is still pulling in strong numbers.
According to statistics from YouTube:
YouTube has over a billion users—almost one-third of all people on the internet—and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views
The number of hours that people spend watching videos on YouTube is increasing 60 percent year-over-year
The number of people watching YouTube has increased 40 percent year-over-year since March 2014
Has the era of native social video arrived? We predict that in 2016 the battle between video superpowers Facebook and YouTube will heat up. Meanwhile, we’ll see how newcomers like Snapchat will contribute to the overall growth of social video as a medium.
But video isn’t the only big trend that’s going to impact your social media strategy in the new year.
What else do we see for 2016?
Social is the new front door—brands are investing in reaching customers where they are: mobile and social.
Messaging makes a play for our attention—while channels are increasingly fragmented, the feature sets offered by each are actually converging.
#SocialBusiness finally happens—the long awaited transformation of workplace communication promised by social media is here.
Are you wondering where you should invest your time and budget in 2016 to get the best results? Join Ashley Brookes, director of brand & social at Hootsuite and Jenny Heinrich, VP digital strategy at Edelman, for a live webinar to learn about the social media trends that will impact your business in 2016.
