Customer Experience

By Liam Dowd - September 2nd, 2014

How to increase YouTube engagement, social wellbeing and why social media marketing needs to be visual

How to increase engagement on YouTube

Video as all corporations know has become the most shared type of content online. Social media networks that contain video are the most favoured, but YouTube continues to be king. But how does your corporation ensure its video is highly engaging and will be shared?

A handy infographic from Quick Sprout offers not only the latest insight into how video is being used, but also practical steps your business can take to improve the engagement rate of each video placed on your corporation’s YouTube account.

Compressing time

Instagram have been busy innovating to offer their users even more features when shooting video. Hyperlapse as its name suggests enables anyone to capture time-lapse video with any iOS device. The interface for the new service is straightforward to use. Already brands are experimenting with what this new service could offer with this fast walk around of Cosmopolitan’s offices.

Social marketing is visual

It is estimated that by 2016, over half of the traffic across the Internet will be visual information in the form of images and video. The rise of Pinterest and of course YouTube is testament to that. The question for all corporations is how to leverage this propensity to share visual information, and ensure that the visual content that is produced engages with its intended audience.

A new infographic from Gryffin neatly summaries the power that visual content now has, and also offers practical advice about how to make the most of this content across your social media networks. Taking the time to re-evaluate your corporation’s creation of visual content will be time well spent, as this task alone could deliver increased levels of traffic and engagement.

Negative social moods

The much-publicised Facebook experiment into how mood is altered by social media moves on with a significant piece of research from Fabio Sabatini from the Sapienza University in Rome and Francesco Sarracino from STATEC, the government statistics agency of Luxembourg. The researchers looked at 50,000 users in Italy between 2010 and 2011 to determine the impact that social media networks were having on their wellbeing.

Reviewing the material the MIT Technology Review stated: “The survey specifically asks the question “How satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays?” requiring an answer from extremely dissatisfied (0) to extremely satisfied (10). This provides a well-established measure of subjective wellbeing.

“The survey also asks other detailed questions such as how often people meet friends and whether they think people can be trusted. It also asked about people’s use of online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

“This allowed Sabatini and Sarracino to study the correlation between subjective well-being and other factors in their life, particularly their use of social networks. As statisticians they were particularly careful to rule out spurious correlations that can be explained by factors such as endogeneity bias where a seemingly independent parameter is actually correlated with an unobserved factor relegated to the error.

“They found for example that face-to-face interactions and the trust people place in one another are strongly correlated with well-being in a positive way. In other words, if you tend to trust people and have lots of face-to-face interactions, you will probably assess your well-being more highly.”

What is clear from this research is that social media networks must take care when promoting their content as accurate and truthful. The trust that users place in the social media networks they use will influence their overall impression of the network itself and how this impacts on their usage and consequently their wellbeing when using the service. More moderation then is core to ensuring content on all social media platforms your corporation supports is accurate and trustworthy.

Until next time….

The Useful Social Media team.