Writing an article about the trending of audio and video content on social media is in itself an irony. However, there is no denying the fact that most people today are too busy to read through a complete article. To make sure that content is more readable and shareable, even written content has become more precise and exclusive pointer oriented. This only suggests that people are getting inclined towards easily accessible videos or audios.
Visual content is easy to understand and also more appealing considering the very fact that it contains visuals. No wonder there are so many social media platforms incorporating the video sharing and recording feature. Among the latest example, Twitter has added a video recording facility to their direct messaging facility and guess what it is trending rapidly!
What is even more interesting is the fact that channels which already allowed sharing visual content, such as Instagram are also incorporating the video recording and sharing facility. Another trending example about the increasing use of video content is the constantly rising fan base for Vine. That is exactly the reason why even huge brands today are using vine videos to run extensive campaigns online.
So, now you might have this question in head, how does audio content any better chance than written content? The most enthusing part about audio content is it is the easiest to create. Also it is picked up fast by various audio broadcasting channels and hence has a faster and larger reach. For example, simply creating a podcast and registering it on iTunes makes the audio track available to more than 5oo million registered users.
This report about the time spent by Americans listening to various audio sources might be helpful:
According to a study conducted by Cisco, by 2017 69% of consumers on the internet would be consuming video content. Another interesting finding is that close to 64% of marketers expect their campaigns to be video dominated.
What proves that audio and video consumption is constantly increasing?
Here are some statistics to show the popularity of Youtube: (source yourtube)
1. Total Youtube users: Over 1 billion unique users every month
2. Youtube receives over 100 hours of video uploads every hour
3. Over 6 billion hours worth of videos are watched by people around the world, in just a month’s time.
What is happening?
1. So, the world is going mobile. Well, here is something to lighten you up! Youtube’s video watch time through mobiles is higher than 40% of its total watch hours.
2. According to a recent study, close to 52% of marketing professionals confide on video content for better ROI.
3. People have the patience to read minimal content; they focus specifically on the highlighted points. However, 65% of video viewers watch more than 3/4th of a video. (Source: The Marketers Summary 2014)
4. With facilities such as Audible which works like an audio Kindle, people now do not need to read, they can simply listen to e-audiobooks instead of reading boring and time consuming e-books.
This graph showing online video consumption through various devices shows the power of videos distinctly:
Source: Ooyala
With most marketing strategies today concentrating on content which is more attractive and easy to understand, video and audio content has taken over all other forms. It is interesting that human brains processes videos 60,000X times faster and 90% of information processed by the brain is in visual form. (Sources: 3M Corporation and Zabisco). This only means I should wrap this article and shift to watching a video instead!