Social video, pharma’s best and worst content format

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Date posted: 25 October 2017

Social video, pharma’s best and worst content format ???

Video has arguably become the dominant format across social media in the last 18 months, with each social network evolving their platform’s capabilities in this space. From Instagram video Stories to Facebook Live and even native LinkedIn video, it’s a hot topic.

Furthermore, and of real interest for brands and publishers, video offers the added bonus of being one of very few digital formats to offer a sense of how much time was spent with it.

Although, that’s not to say measuring it isn’t without its challenges. This post outlines what can make measuring video tricky, and suggests some approaches to simplify.

When we talk about “videos” there are so many variations to bear in mind.

First off, a video can of course be of any duration. Comparing a five-second video with a four-minute piece is unlikely to offer a fair comparison.

Secondly, the way video is presented in different social networks shapes how it’s consumed:

• On Twitter and Facebook, videos must work hard to capture audience attention in rapidly scrolling newsfeed environments
• Snapchat and Instagram ads pop up between other Stories in a more disruptive style
• And on the grandfather of video, YouTube, content is typically sought out by the viewer, with episodic content of 10-20 minutes being far more prominent

(There are of course many other formats, and Facebook noticeably is now getting into the longer form space with its Watch tab feature).

Finally, and most importantly when it comes to assessing performance, we must consider different objectives. Was the video trying to get people to click through to a website? Was it to encourage people to tell their friends about it and, by extension, the brand?

Speaking of measuring performance, there certainly isn’t a lack of metrics. Some of the most prominent include:

• Views: to understand how many people actually saw a video (see note below)
• Watch time: total amount of time all viewers spent watching a video
• Percent completion: what percentage of a video the average person watched
• Views with sound on: how much the video drew in the viewer and encouraged them to be more immersed in the creative

However, this is where more of the nuance comes in. A couple of key things to consider are:

• Different social networks define “a view” in different ways, and there’s a whole debate as to what fairly constitutes a view. Should 3 seconds of a video that auto-plays without sound be deemed as a view? (discuss!)
• Facebook provides some measures for organic video (e.g. 3 sec, 10 sec, 95% completion), but then further metrics are only available for paid videos, which makes it more difficult to compare apples with apples.

Having all of these options means you can get right into the detail of what happened around an individual video. However, when you start trying to take more of a macro view, the amount of variables can become problematic. We’ve already discussed different objectives, different social networks, paid vs organic, video length and a host of different metrics… and we’ve not even touched on different audience groups!

To have a chance of seeing the wood for the trees and understanding how well different types of video are performing, some sort of barometer or benchmark is required.

There’s no one-size fits all approach, but here are a few ideas on simplifying these variations from a reporting perspective…

• Keep social networks separate: trying to group performance across different social networks is very problematic, it’s best not to combine them as they are just too different
• Video length: can you group videos into perhaps two groups – short (under 15 seconds) and long (over 15 seconds)? The first delivering short sharp bursts of information versus longer form “stories”, such as a how-to guide or recipe
• Video metric: will something like 50% video completion work as a common measure for all videos? If someone gets through half of a short video, they’ve arguably taken on board much of the information it’s trying to convey. And if someone watches at least 50% of a long video, it shows they’ve decided to spend a chunk of time (by social network browsing standards) with your brand

The above might be considered too simplistic. Or you might feel that different completion percentages are appropriate for longer/shorter pieces of content. But hopefully what it can do is free you from drowning in data by trying to assess too many variables… and subsequently extracting no insights.

Beyond the above approach, you’ll of course want to run more in-depth analysis around the way different video styles are performing (e.g. person speaking to camera, vs hands in shot demonstration). By filtering on the style of video content first and then analysing performance across your chosen metrics should help you extract some actionable insights.

• Assess the ratio of paid to organic video views… this can be an effective way of further illustrating the impact of different creative
• Consider different types of media-buy for video against different “viewability standards”, such as a 2 second view, completed views or just impressions. It’s certainly one to watch as social networks and media agencies grapple with it

• Video is great because you get a sense of time spent with the brand
• However, there are many nuances around measuring it
• The most important thing is having a clear understanding of the video’s objective
• Simplify your reporting and analysis to spot patterns