Video Marketing Trends Shaping 2015

Facebook video was already outpacing YouTube shares

By the start of 2015, native video uploaded directly to Facebook was already being shared more often than YouTube links posted to Facebook, a shift that had been building through the second half of 2014. Marketers who had built their video strategy around a YouTube channel and hoped Facebook shares would follow were starting to rethink where a video should live first.

Sound-off viewing became the default assumption

Facebook’s autoplay feature, which played video silently as people scrolled, had trained an entire audience to watch without sound unless something on screen made them tap for it. Brands that treated video as a shrunk-down television ad, dependent on a voiceover or music to land the message, were losing viewers in the first three seconds. Captions and clear visual storytelling stopped being a nice touch and became a requirement.

Instagram opened video advertising to more brands

Instagram had introduced video ads to a small set of advertisers in late 2014 and was widening access into 2015, giving businesses a second short-form video channel beyond Vine, with a more polished, curated feel that suited brands wary of Vine’s rawer style.

Mobile-first framing started to matter

With most video views on Facebook and Instagram happening on phones, marketers were rethinking shot composition for smaller, often square screens, rather than simply repurposing widescreen footage shot for television or YouTube. A close-up product shot that read clearly on a five-inch screen mattered more than a wide establishing shot that had worked fine in a cinema ad.

Shorter was winning, again

The success of Vine’s six-second format and Instagram’s fifteen-second clips kept pushing even longer-form video marketing toward tighter edits. Marketers making two and three-minute product videos in 2015 increasingly cut them down, or built a short version specifically for social feeds, on the assumption that most of the audience would leave well before a longer video reached its point.

What businesses were watching for next

Live, unedited video was starting to generate real buzz in industry conversations even before any major platform had built a mainstream live feature for ordinary users. Marketers who paid attention to that undercurrent in early 2015 were better positioned than most to move fast once live tools arrived later in the year.

More from the archive: browse the Content Marketing category or see everything published in 2015.