Social Video Chart: Your At-A-Glance Guide To 7 Major Platforms
A side-by-side feature comparison of the seven major social video players -- YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat and Tumblr.
Martin Beck, June 2015
Online video is … so hot right now.
And with apologies to Ben Stiller and the Zoolander crew, it’s not likely to cool off anytime soon. The metrics are staggering: Facebook regularly touts its 4 billion daily views, Snapchat says it now serves 2 billion views a day and YouTube checks in with hundreds of millions of hours watched daily.
Head-spinning numbers, but that’s not the complicated part for marketers to manage. Just about every online entity seems to be jumping into the game and each platform has unique requirements, metric measurement capabilities and sharing features to keep track of. Some provide robust analytics to anyone posting a video on their sites; others only share that information with advertisers. Some video starts playing automatically without sound; some doesn’t start until someone clicks on it. How the networks count video views has even come into question.
So with hopes of making sense of a sometimes confusing landscape, we’ve put together a guide to social video platforms, with information compiled from seven of the leading companies in the space. We focused on the socially focused networks that specialize in clip-based video sharing, rather than live streamers like UStream, Livestream, Google Hangouts on Air, Periscope or Meerkat (which we believe are different animals because they are meant primarily for live consumption and either can’t be watched later or probably rarely are).
Each of the networks in our guide allows brands to post video natively and all except for Vine give the option to promote video with advertising dollars. (Although Vine videos can be promoted on Twitter.)
Thanks to marketing pro and spreadsheet wiz Andréa Lopez, who is keeping tabs on these issues as well and from whom we have borrowed some ideas.
How To Read The Chart
Here’s our legend to what’s on the guide:
What Counts As A View: If you thought watching an entire video is required for a view, you thought wrong. A view can be counted if someone watches only a few seconds of a video. For more, see our other stories about the issue: What’s A Video View? On Facebook, Only 3 Seconds Vs. 30 At YouTube and Do Video Views Matter? CMOs Weigh In On The Video Marketing Metrics That Count
Auto-Play: Does the video play automatically or require someone to manually click or take an action? For video that auto-plays, it’s wise to create video with compelling imagery in the very first frames, since you are hoping for a click to activate the full video experience (and competing against other moving pictures in the feed).
Auto-Loop: Does the video keep playing while a user remains on the post?
Default Audio State: Does the video play sound automatically or not?
Maximum Length: How long can your video masterpiece be? Keep in mind that if you’re trying to use the same video across multiple platforms, a lowest-common denominator approach might be wise. Aim for Vine, and you’ve got a six-second video that works most anywhere else. Aim for Instagram and its 15-second maximum, and that also can work on many other platforms. Anything longer than Twitter’s 30 seconds and you’ll be limited to YouTube, Facebook and Tumblr. [Update: Note that Twitter’s 30-second maximum only applies to video uploaded natively from mobile devices. Users promoting video using Twitter’s video card can upload video of up to 10 minutes.
Embeddable: Can you share your video in a web page outside the platform itself?
View Counts (Public): Can the public tell how popular (or not) your video is, in terms of views?
View Counts (Owner): Can you tell how popular your video is? Usually, this is an option for advertisers in cases in which view counts aren’t shown to the public.
Metric Dashboard: Does the platform make it easy to have an overview of what’s happening with all your video content?
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