There was a time, a company needed film or videos only for advertising on TV, for the showroom or for internal training purposes. This was just a few years ago.
Nowadays, videos are everywhere. Actually, they often come instead of written communication. The major platform for videos are social media and many take this as term for all videos placed on the internet..
If a company publishes a video on their website, this isn’t social media, but it is very likely that the same video will find its way to the social media platforms, as well.
There are differences though and it is worth to bear them in mind:
Time is the major difference between social media videos and videos published on a website. Social Media videos have a chance to be noted only in a very short period of time. When you put your video on Facebook or Twitter, quite often only people who are around will take note of it.
This also applied to commercials in the TV age, but at that time you could be sure that if you place a commercial at prime time that you had millions of viewers guaranteed. Your audience on social media for a given slot is much smaller nowadays.
Social Media also require constant feeds, which pushes older videos soon into the virtual attic.
On the contrary, videos on your website can stay for some time. They essentially are there for people who visit the website. The question here is how to direct traffic to your website.
Some might also think that the length of a video may differ between a social media video and a website video. Depending on the topic and your audience, website videos can be longer, while social media videos should aim for being shorter than 1 minute as social media users are usually in a hurry. But again, also visitors of a website are often rushing through and won’t really have time for long promotional videos.
This then leads to a question whether it makes sense to put a lot of effort and essentially costs either into social media videos or internet videos in general.
The answer for both is the same: It depends on whether there is adequate marketing budget on top of your video production costs.
If you can spend additional money on SEO and frequent placing of videos in social media you will get a bigger audience.
In any case, there is more attention for a video than for a text whether the person watches the video through to the end or just the beginning.
At the end, it is about finding the right balance between video production costs and gain. And this is what both social media videos and internet videos have in common.
