Rising shift to visual language on social media

Recently, more videos are popping up on social media as people in Hong Kong increasingly turn to social platforms to discover and share the latest and greatest content, as well as be inspired by meaningful moments.

Brands and marketers are taking notice of this growing trend to boost their digital campaigns. Last year, for example, Nike Hong Kong scored big with its investment on video ads on their own fan pages to promote its "Risk Everything" soccer campaign, reaching almost 50% of the population with internet connection in just one day.

Luxury brands are also embracing videos on same platform. Rogert Dubuis used a series of videos to generate buzz for its brand and to position itself as an unconventional watchmaker, reaching 50% of its target audience in just two weeks.

This video sequence was an effective storytelling approach, allowing the brand to target audiences who are interested in luxury watches and re-target those who watched the previous videos.

Video is also making a big difference to local small businesses such as Here We Seoul, a cosmetics and beauty supply retailer, which used video tutorials to attract more customers to its booming range of Korean beauty products sold online.

Hong Kong's entertainment also sees a big role for video on social media. Recently, Fiona Sit has her official music video "All the rainy days" debuted on her social media page.

The shift to visual language on social media is coming to life across the globe with the number of video posts on different platforms, for example Facebook increasing by 75% globally in just one year, two-thirds of which are on mobile. Globally, there are now more than 4 billion video views per day.

In Hong Kong, about 53% of the 4.5 million people who visit the platform at least once post and watch video on the social platform every day, most of them via mobile.

Fuelling this shift is the evolution of storytelling towards more visual content. Online platform could be an ideal creative canvas for this. For brands and marketers, video ads also make for rich storytelling with sight, sound, and motion; and therefore delivering more emotional impact to brand-building.

Wyeth Nutrition Hong Kong leveraged this emotional impact when it launched its video ad campaign that promoted the loving bond between mothers and their children. In two weeks, it reached over 1 million users with 476,000 views.

This also delivered significant boost in advertising effectiveness with 20% increase in brand consideration, and 300% increase in interaction for its fan page.

With video becoming a major consumer activity on the social platform, this is a great way for advertisers to reach their desired audiences with personalised and compelling content. With the massive reach of social media, advertisers can also extend their TV investment with video on their social media channels as well as on mobile.

Video ads on designated platform can drive all brand objectives by seeding with hyper target teasers to generate buzz about a new product or brand campaign with a core target.

Also, advertisers can blast a video to reach a massive audience to build awareness quickly, and continuously use video to sustain and reinforce the message after the initial blast. Video is truly powerful to drive awareness, consideration, and ultimately conversion.

A typical video ad is about 15 seconds with 1:1 aspect ratio and auto-play with sound off on default. At the core of a successful video however is creative content. At any social media platform, content is king again and that that technology should enable better creativity and not replace it.

We are seeing that people are expressing themselves differently on their personal platforms. They come to the photo or video sharing driven platform to be inspired, and share meaningful moments, while people use online social utility to discover and share personally relevant content.

Mobile has been a key driver of this with consumers using several devices 24 hours a day. To encourage advertisers on how they can better use their own channels, social media platform started to show people how many views a video on the platform has received.

Views will be shown on all public videos from people and pages. This will help people discover popular videos, and help businesses gather information about how their videos are performing.