Boost your social video content strategy by using social media monitoring tools to find out what engages audiences and will make your videos go viral What is your audience really interested in?
As you start to develop a social video content strategy, you’re going to want to know what kind of clips your customers want to see. Are they interested in entertaining content? Videos that make them smile - or open their eyes? Do they engage with videos which make their jaws drop, or do they seem interested in content that makes them think?
Besides the kind of social video content they like, you’re also going to want to know what is trending - what kinds of video seem to get most views right now.
Social media monitoring (sometimes called ‘social listening’) tools are a great way of finding this kind of information out. Let’s look at what social media monitoring tools can do and how they can help develop your social video content strategy.
What is social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring can be defined as: “the active monitoring of social media channels for information about a company or organisation”. Typically, it involves using one of the many different tools available which monitor what people are saying on social media platforms. These tools can scan for:
- Keywords related to a company or topic
- Sentiment - whether people are happy or upset about something
- Levels of engagement with a topic or company
- What your competitors are doing on social media (and what people think of them)
There are many reasons companies engage in social media monitoring, including:
- Public relations:
Responding to negative (and positive) tweets or posts and countering false claims - Competitor analysis:
What can you learn from what competitors are doing? - Market research:
What problems are people talking about online that you can help with? - Content ideation:
Find out what videos, blogs, articles and posts seem to interest and engage consumers
How to monitor social media for social video content ideas
As noted above, there’s a wide range of social media monitoring tools that can help you discover ideas for your social video content strategy (here’s a list of 12 popular ones). By using a tool that scans social media platforms, you can begin discovering hashtags, topics and conversations around particular clips and widely shared videos. You can also use platforms like BuzzSumo to find out what content is trending on different platforms.
That said, if you’re only planning on sharing videos on one or two platforms, and don’t need all the added features like ‘sentiment analysis’, you may find your preferred platforms’ own analysis and search tools give you most of the information you need.
Here’s how to use the inbuilt tools on some of the leading social media platforms:
Facebook
Use Facebook’s Search FYI feature to look for videos related to your company’s area of interest. This can help you quickly find out which videos are trending and what length and style of video people seem to engage with most.
Twitter
Twitter’s ‘moments’ feature is a great tool for discovering what’s trending on the platform right now, and draws much of its content from trusted sources such as BuzzFeed, the New York Times, Mashable and plenty more. By filtering through content, you can find out the kinds of videos people seem to engage with most.
Instagram
At present, Instagram does not offer a pure video search filter. However, by typing the word ‘video’ after the hashtag you’re interested in, you’ll still find a good amount of content to use for inspiration.
Google Trends
Finally, Google Trends is a useful tool for discovering what content is popular on YouTube over time - simply select ‘YouTube Search’ when investigating keywords.
Example: finding what clips viewers are interested in
Imagine you work at a production company which films live soccer matches. Now, it seems obvious that certain moments in a game will likely be popular for the purposes of clipping and publishing - not least goals, fouls, tackles and so on.
However, what you’re really looking for is to dig deeper into the content. Begin by asking some key questions:
- What style of clips are our competitors already sharing? Is it goals? Match summaries? Unusual celebrations?
- What kind of content are audiences engaging with most? What clips get most views, shares and comments?
- How are the videos titled and edited? Do long, descriptive titles seem to be common (e.g. Cristiano Ronaldo scores amazing goal from 50 yards out) or shorter, intriguing ones (Can you believe Ronaldo just did this???)
- What formats do clips come in? Are they square or horizontal?
- Do clips include subtitles (for playing when sound is turned off)?
- Are clips personalized or edited for different distribution channels (are clips the same on Facebook and Twitter or different?)
- How long are the clips?
- How much advertising accompanies them?
- What kinds of tags accompany the videos? How many?
Once you have used social media listening tools to get an idea of what is and isn’t popular, you can then begin figuring out the next steps. Clearly, one benefit of this research is to try and find ways to differentiate your content to make it stand out from the many other sports content providers.
Social listening should play a key part in your social video content strategy
Any successful social video content strategy will depend on truly knowing who your audience is and what they’re interested in. As we’ve seen here, social monitoring is a great way of doing this and means your strategy is based less on guess work and more on people’s genuine interests.
Once you’ve worked out your strategy, the next step is to put it into action. Learn how Wildmoka’s live clipping tools help you rapidly share the kind of content viewers love.