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5 reasons Social Media & Google loves video

Whether it’s Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or Google, video content on social media is what marketers need to focus on in 2017. Equally we are seeing greater rewards form utilising video content across social channels. As an agency we have spent a considerable amount of time understanding how each social channel is optimising its platform to allow for more video content in users’ feeds, and how brands are positively using video content to engage their followers.

If you’re serious about digital marketing, SEO, you’ll probably know that Social media, and Google loves video and is inclined to prioritise it for search result returns, and social feeds. Additionally research from the Strother Communications Group says that including video on your website landing page improves its chances of a page 1 Google listing by 53%. Let’s take a look at why social media and search is loving video so much:

1. More inbound links

Research by SEOmoz shows that blog posts that use video will gain three times more inbound links than those without. This results in a higher ranking as inbound links support video SEO.

2. Sticky viewing and thumb stopper moments 

The use of video is also shown to increase the amount of time that visitors will remain on a page – called the ‘stickiness’ factor. Google views this sticky factor as being key when it ranks sites. So, if a viewer remains on a page for a long while, Google will rank that page more favourably in the future. The most popular social media platforms should really be considered as publishers at this stage of their evolution due to the amount of content consumers are digesting, with such volumes it can be hard to create cut-through with just words alone, you can combat the barrage of thumb scrolling quite effectively with video, and create thumb stopper moments.

3. Keywords

Read a video transcript and you’ll notice that they are naturally packed with keywords. This means that you should always upload your video transcript when you add a video to your website. This allows Google to index the transcript, picking out keywords and boosting those links back to your page. This allows Google to see that your video content is naturally relevant to your site, which is enough to boost it up the rankings for SEO.

4. Tapping into YouTube

Google might well be the world’s largest search engine, but YouTube is in some ways the second. By adding your own video content, you automatically get to be a part of this vast search engine. More than 100 hours of new content is added to the channel per minute, so there is huge potential for allowing your brand to become part of the platform and reach your target audience. If you make good content, more people will visit your site to find out more – growing your SEO. And not forgetting that YouTube is owned by Google, another reason you’ll be rewarded for embedding their video content on your site.

5. Shareable

Video is so easy to share – when you post it on social media, there is an automatic share feature, along with the ability to generate social signals such as share and like. Again, this all builds the links to your website, which highlights to Google that it needs to rank you higher.

So, knowing how important video is to your website – how does this work with your content plan for 2017? If you’re still not sure, benefit from our experience as a trusted Digital Marketing agency in Dublin and contact us today.