In general, video posts > text posts. Emarketer predicts video advertising will account for 80-90% of global consumer Internet traffic by 2018. (That’s huge!) This is in large part due to the magnitude of benefits social video provides. Here are a few of our favorites:

• Videos are more engaging
• Video content is highly sharable
• The cost of advertising is low
• They’re mobile-friendly
• Autoplay features help increase your views

Looking for tips to help out your social video strategy? Here are three you should know right up front:

1. Diversify your content sources 
   Creating your own videos can be time consuming, and asking your agency’s in-house video guy to create them for you once a week can get expensive. Planning ahead will allow you to shoot multiple videos at a time. Also a good agency will keep multiple uses/platforms in mind when they are shooting. This way you can easily repurpose existing video for social media that gets great results.
    
   Are you running local commercials or pre-roll videos on a website? Have you created videos for non-social media related projects? Use it! Here are a few video examples that were repurposed to share on social media:
    
   Tobacco Stops With Me Pre-Roll
   Oklahoma Tobacco Helpline Quit Coach Campaign
   Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust Documentary Trailer
   Bob Moore Maserati Pre-Roll
   
   
2. Sometimes cheaper and faster is better
   In a world overrun by Internet memes and cat videos, low budget videos are becoming more acceptable, and social media marketers shouldn’t be afraid to create and edit their own video content.  If you don’t have fancy equipment or software, your smart phone will work in a pinch. Smart phone technology is pretty impressive these days, so don’t worry – the result will still be easy on the eyes, and easy on your budget.
    
   Here are a few examples of videos we created with a lower price-point:
    
   Bob Moore Land Rover Bio Video
   Walk-lahoma Video Contest Video
   
   
3. There are always exceptions to the rules
   More social platforms are beginning to make it easy to upload and view videos without ever leaving the site. This is great if your goal is to get more video views, but what if your goal is to drive more traffic to your website? Videos can still help.
    
   Here’s an example: One of our clients is known for great website and frequent video blogs. Rather than uploading his videos directly to Facebook, we started posting them on the client website and provided the links on social media.  As a result, social media became his #1 referral source. The best part is, most visitors viewed more than one page, which means after watching his video, they were interested enough in the content to click around and learn more. In this case, videos were an effective tool that helped reach a different goal.

Using videos effectively on social requires some creativity, but they’re a powerful tool to help social media marketers meet their goals.