LOS ANGELES — While the long-standing prohibition against porn on mainstream social media sites is unlikely to change in the near future, recent moves to embrace video posts are providing promise to marketers across the board, adult and mainstream alike.
The numbers are compelling: with stats showing that a third of internet usage involves viewing videos; while using a video on a landing page can increase conversions by up to 80 percent; and more than 65 percent of mobile marketers are upping video use — in part due to high engagement and sharing.
Given the power and productivity of video, and the ease with which today’s smartphone users can produce compelling content, it’s no wonder so many companies are eager to jump on the bandwagon.
According to Twitter, tweeters use video to capture and share life’s meaningful moments from their own perspective.
The company makes it easy through apps for Android and iPhone, empowering the newest generations of content creators and consumers alike. This empowerment is boosted through Engage, a new analytics app for gauging user engagement and tweet metrics.
Twitter’s Head of product development for Creators, Jeremy Rishel, says the company loves watching all of the timely, important, and funny video content people share every day.
“Every day, the world turns to Twitter to discuss the videos that everyone is talking about now,” Rishel explains. “Whether it’s sports, news, or music, musings from popular creators, on-the-ground footage from a world event, or a glance into daily life that might just go viral … video is becoming increasingly central to the real-time conversations happening on Twitter.”
Rishel notes that video on Twitter has increased by more than 50 percent since the beginning of 2016, underscoring its popularity.
Building on this foundation, Twitter announced today its intention to allow longer videos of up to 140 seconds to be posted on its service — a significant increase over the previous 30 second limit — as well as longer clips for the popular Vine video service.
“Starting with a small group, creators will be able to add a video (up to 140 seconds) to their Vine,” Rishel says, “turning the six second Vine into a trailer for a bigger story.”
Certain publishers can also post videos up to 10 minutes long by using its professional publisher tools, while full-screen viewing and suggested videos presented on completion, round out the experience.
The move follows the company’s addition of live streaming Periscope videos on Twitter users’ timelines earlier this year, and recent acquisition of a tech startup that brings video processing technology such as the ability to sharpen blurry, low-resolution videos in real time, to the table.
Twitter’s motivation may have more to do with competition than with catering to consumers, however, with Snapchat reportedly boasting 10 million more daily users, and Facebook seeing a stiff increase in the number of videos hitting its timelines.
In addition, Tumblr is also getting in on the video act, proclaiming “by the end of today, you’ll be able to broadcast yourself directly into your followers’ dashboards [and] they’ll be able to broadcast themselves directly into yours.”
“We trust you all to be beautiful, weird, compelling, and just generally Tumblr about this whole thing,” explains a Tumblr staff member, who notes that videos can be posted via Android and iOS, as well as through YouTube. “They can be reblogged like any other post. Which is wild. [The videos also] stick around after you shoot them, and can be enjoyed in the future as well as the present.”
“We’ll notify you when anyone you follow goes live [and] pin their video to the top of your dashboard,” the staffer adds. “[We] wouldn’t want you to miss anything, after all.”
It’s all part of the evolution of social media, the way we communicate with one another, and the way that we sell our products and services to each other. For adult marketers used to operating on Twitter and Tumblr, it is a golden opportunity as well.