12 May Social You Should Know: Social Video is Changing Rapidly
Two big shifts in what social media means and more data on Facebook ad performance in this week’s Social You Should Know.
Highly Shared Vines Creeping Into Brand Marketing Plans
New research from Unruly Media shows that branded Vines are shared four times more often than branded Internet videos. They also found that four percent of the top Vines came from brands, while only one percent of the top viral videos were from brands. Vine is now only 100 days old, but big brands are starting to see some success. I suspect that the spread is because a six second, ad-free Vine is a much smaller commitment than watching a longer video, which could be made longer by a pre-roll ad.
YouTube Now Selling Paid Subscriptions to Channels
Sesame Street, Cars.TV and the UFC are among the early partners for YouTube’s new paid channels. Want to watch their content on YouTube? Pay up. Costs start at $0.99 and go up from there. It’s an interesting model, taking aim at Netflix and other paid sources of streaming content. Unless you’re a frequent producer of high quality content, going paid is an unlikely move for most brands, but it is the latest signal that YouTube is changing its strategy.
Facebook Ads in the News Feed Perform 197% Better than Sidebar
Ads running in the right rail of Facebook (the original ad format) have long been blasted for their ineffectiveness. New research shows that ads in the News Feed are, well, a lot less ineffective. Ads in the News Feed have CTRs that are 17.1 times higher than the right rail ads, and the cost per click is 51 percent lower. That leads to a 197 percent improvement in ROI. That’s good, but let’s remember that this is relative. Facebook ads don’t perform any better than traditional banner ads. And we know that organic views significantly outperform paid clicks.
Enjoy your week.
