Social media is becoming an increasingly popular place to discover video content. Brands are taking notice and embracing the power of social video and the ease of sharing video content on social platforms other than YouTube. However, with the sheer amount of noise on social media, it’s becoming much more difficult to break through the clutter and make sure your videos get in front of the right audiences.
To succeed at video marketing on social media, it’s important to take a step back and start at the beginning. Coming up with a fantastic idea for a video is one of the most important steps to get your audience to share, share, share.
If you want to generate truly engaging video content, you’ll need to put in time and effort to research and discover the trending topics that will appeal to your target audience. Many of the major social networks have yet to incorporate video discovery tools that make it easy to find video content, so using the following tips and tools you can discover what’s trending in the video world on each social network.
How to Find Trending Videos on Facebook
Facebook is the master of everything, and that includes video. The social network is on its way to becoming a massive competitor to YouTube for both video marketing and content distribution. However, discovering trending videos on the platform is not so simple.
The good news is Facebook plans to supercharge video discovery through a dedicated Video Feed that will appear with separate channels for videos shared by friends, pages you like, trending videos on Facebook, videos you’ve saved, or videos you’ve previously viewed. This new video discovery option is still being tested, however there’s no doubt it will radically change Facebook video marketing in the coming months.
Facebook also has a ‘Trending Topics’ which is a quick and easy way to see which news stories, articles, and videos everyone is talking about. The topics are accompanied by a short headline and clicking a topic will take you to a collection of articles and posts from various media sources. Trending topics gives your brand the opportunity to enter conversations people are having by posting video content relevant to that discussion. And the site recently announced Search FYI which opens up more posts for discovery, including video content.
Finally, if you type in ‘video’ in the Facebook search bar, a feed featuring natively-uploaded video posts from your friends and groups will appear. Below that, you can scroll through a feed full of public video posts with high interaction counts. Take a look at which videos have the most views or shares, and you can quickly get an idea of what types of videos are attracting the most interactions on the platform.
How to Discover Videos on Twitter
How do Twitter users consume, discover and engage with video? Twitter is all about discovering interesting content in the moment and it is used much differently than YouTube for video consumption. A recent survey on the Twitter blog revealed 41% of Twitter users think it is a great place to discover videos. 70% of Twitter users who responded said they only/mostly watch videos that they discover in their timelines, and 11% said they use search on Twitter to find specific videos.
Now you can also discover trending video content on Twitter using a new feature the site has introduced called Moments. Twitter Moments displays the best of what’s happening on Twitter in an instant. These Moments are curated by the internal media team at Twitter from a select group of partners including BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Getty Images, The New York Times and others.
Regardless of who you follow, you can tap Moments and discover stories unfolding on the platform. When you dive into a story, you can view images and autoplaying videos, Vines, and GIFs. Videos are heavily placed front and center of each Moment’s feed, so this is a great way for brands to quickly generate video content ideas based on what’s new and noteworthy.
Recently, Twitter has taken many steps to make it dead simple to discover videos from around the world on Periscope, the Twitter-owned app that allows users to stream live video. The app now features an interactive world map that displays the locations of available live feeds. However, if you want to quickly search for live Periscope videos, there are a few easier ways than switching to the app.
One tool you can use is Getxplore. After you link your Twitter account, you can see both Periscope and Meerkat streams and enter search queries to narrow down video streams in your industry. You can also manually search #Periscope on Twitter to view all live-streaming video posted to the network. You can even add a location filter to view all real-time videos within a specific location.
There are many free tools to search trending content on Twitter without logging into the social network. The Hash Twitter client and Hash iOS app beautifully display the stories people are talking about each day. Get up-to-date with news stories as well as follow conversations about stories that interest you or relate to your brand. Hash also has a section dedicated to the most popular Vine videos of the day.
Topsy is another free social search engine that allows you to search video content by keyword, topic, or hashtag. Another good option is Twipho, a is Twitter tool that lets you search what’s trending by searching a keyword, location or specific people. Although Twipho focuses on photos, you can also search popular videos by adding the word “video” at the end of your search term to view thumbnail search results of popular video tweets.
Trending Topics on Instagram
An estimated 70 million photos and videos are posted on Instagram every day. The social network is now trying a new way to surface popular content with an upgraded discovery feature. This new feature divides search into two categories: Top Posts and Most Recent.
Although there is no way to strictly search video content yet, the best way to return video results is to add the word “video” to the end of your hashtagged keyword or phrase. You can then tap the related keywords to view similar trending posts.
Take a Deep Dive on Google & Buzzsumo
Sifting through social media to find video content, especially quality engaging video content, can be a challenge. We now not only have to dig through user-generated content, but also endless streams of video content from commercial publishers and advertisers. Fortunately, social networks like Facebook and Twitter are working hard to push out new tools that make discovering amazing content much easier, but there is still room for video search improvement. Until then, Google Trends and Buzzsumo are quick and easy video discovery tools you can also use.
If we group Google Plus and YouTube under the same Google umbrella, then we definitely have to mention Google Trends. This search tool, which allows you to search popular queries and explore traffic patterns over time and geography, now lets you search YouTube data as well, making it another excellent way to discover popular videos. Go to Google Trends and in the drop-down menu choose “Trending on YouTube”. Google will display the top trending videos on YouTube, which can be filtered by country and date.
A content marketing favorite, BuzzSumo, is one of the best tools for discovering trending content – and that including video. Filter by Content Type > Video, then type in a keyword idea related to your brand. BuzzSumo will display the videos with the most social shares, broken down by platform. In the first column you can see how many Facebook shares each video received and see which videos are trending in your specific industry.
Author: Anish Patel
Courtesy: www.reelseo.com
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