Want People to View Your Videos? New Data Confirms the Future is Social

While many of us are dedicated to producing great video content, we often neglect to think about how that content will be consumed by the masses. I spend so much time producing, directing, writing and editing video that by the time it's done, I neglect to give distribution as much consideration as I should. A recent study performed by Harris Interactive shows, somewhat unsurprisingly, that video is moving away from search and is more tightly tied to social sharing.

The study, released by Telly, reveals that 78 million American mobile device owners (35%) watch video on their mobile device. Of these 78 million, 52 million mobile video watchers (67%) discover content from friends via social recommendations, versus 32 million American mobile video watchers (41%) who find videos on their mobile devices via search engines.

Of the 52 million mobile video watchers who rely on social recommendations to discover video, many cited multiple ways in which they are finding videos from people they know. 35 million say they discover videos from connections on social networks, while 28 million Americans site that they discover videos from email sent from friends and family, and 23 million find content to watch from texts/MMS.

This echoes a major shift, from search to social, in the way consumers discover and consume digital video content on their mobile devices verses desktop. This should not come as a major surprise, but it's good to finally have some hard data to back up what theories many media marketers have been thinking.

Social recommendations are so powerful that 1 in 10 people who watch videos on their mobile device, or 12 million, say the only thing holding them back from watching more video on mobile is that they will only watch videos sent to them by friends. All of these findings indicate that consumers want a more social way to easily discover video on mobile. Telly’s findings support Adobe’s April 2013 study that stated, “social engagement jumped from 42% to 70% in terms of how likely referrals on networks likeFacebook were to prompt a video viewing completion.” It’s clear that social influence plays a strong role in video viewership on mobile.

Check out these facts and others below in this nifty infographic:

 
This information also backs up why Facebook wants to make so many changes to their interface, with the future updates focused with more emphasis on big blocks of video in the news feed. I found this interesting to share, as we creative professionals need to continually evolve to grow our businesses and our reach. Knowing how people consume what we produce is paramount in leveraging media to grow our professional careers.