The History of Social Media: Why is Video Marketing so Lucrative Today?
Written By: Sully Rahal and Sean Kernerman12 minute readThrough the past 20 years, what are the primary factors that have caused social media to become the lucrative and interactive space it is today? If you spoke to someone 30 years ago and told them that today we’d live in a world where you could reach any friend, brand, or celebrity that you can think of with nothing more than the press of a button in our pockets, there would be very little weight to your words.
Humanity has always evolved and adapted to foreign conditions, and as humanity has evolved over centuries, technology and luxury have become a forefront in our daily lives. People spend hours everyday staring at screens, whether on their phones watching videos, or on their laptops for work. We live in a society perpetually fueled by interaction.
But what caused this shift in our lives? How did we go from barely using flip phones and looking at billboards on the side of the road, to living in a day and age where we can see upwards of 5000+ ads per day without leaving the comfort of our homes? The events that have led us to this point are nothing short of a phenomenon.
To answer that question, you need to look deeper than technology and look at the human psyche. As humans we crave interaction, and technology had reached a point in the early 2000’s where we were able to use modern tech to educate, inform, or entertain ourselves. But there was a disconnect between the technology we had and the interactions we could have with other people using that same technology.
Thus came social media platforms, a way to combine humanity’s advancements and social interaction. In the early days, these platforms were limited to MySpace, MSN, and a few other sites that are rarely used today, if around at all. But over the course of the next decade, Facebook became the primary space that people relied on to stay up-to-date with their peers. Facebook brought something to the table that other platforms didn’t have. You could share photos, you could message or call people, you could update your friends on your every move, and for the first time there was a genuine place that people could visit to profile the world around them in real-time.
However, today we know that the social media landscape is much larger than just Facebook. Although they’re still one of the major networking sites, LinkedIn polished itself as a business from its bleak existence in 2003 into the business-centralized platform it is today, and Google had also entered the landscape with YouTube in 2003 and turned it into the world’s foremost service for video uploading and streaming. With YouTube in the game, the landscape was beginning to see yet another change in such a short timeframe.
But what did YouTube do to change the dynamic of these platforms so quickly?
The answer is complicated. Essentially, as the internet and society as a whole became more involved with video, things began to move from images to videos, and before you know it video became the most effective way to communicate your thoughts and ideas in a concise manner to a large audience. Naturally, businesses loved this. The ability to communicate with your target audience, market your services, and simultaneously show testimony for those services as a small business was now a closer reality than ever before. Prior to YouTube and video-streaming platforms, this was a space that a business could only approach via Television and with a massive studio budget.
So how did this principal segue even further? Well the answer is technology once again. We eventually reached a time where every person had a high-quality 1080p camera sitting right in their pockets. Now more than ever, anyone could make themselves look good and create content for their business or brand with the use of a tool they’d already been using everyday for a variety of other needs. For the first time in human history, the means to create marketable material was in your pocket, the platform to market the material on was also in your pocket, and the client connection and experience was also in your pocket. This shift in the business space created the entrepreneurs we know today and see all around us.
Normal people could create businesses and showcase their products with live use, while targeting who they wanted to see their products. Naturally, this attracted a lot of attention from businesses all over the world, including businesses that had previously been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to do the same thing on TV. Brands everywhere from Nike to Walmart began using platforms like YouTube to market their ads on. The return was much larger than it was on Television, there were no paid time-slots like on TV, and your ad was always being shown to people who were interested in your product thanks to YouTube’s ridiculously advanced Algorithm. It looked like YouTube was about to take over the advertising world, and with the release of services like Google Adsense in 2006, it looked like they were creating tools meant particularly for that.
But this changed when Facebook saw the same formula and decided to use it for themselves. Instagram was made in 2010 with some success, and by 2012 not even 2 years into its release it was bought by Facebook.
Today, Instagram has more than a billion individual users and has grown to become the largest social media app currently within the social media landscape. Instagram initially started out as a photo-sharing platform and remained so for a few years, until Facebook saw how successful YouTube was within the video landscape. Facebook felt threatened by the sudden growth of video online, so Instagram made a fundamental change to their site in order to stay on top of the trend.
Instagram began to notice a shift in short-form video. YouTube had the crown as far as long-form factor and educational videos go, and YouTube had the largest database of users willing to create video content since the process behind editing videos with software we use today was still rather new at the time. YouTube also had the best ad-program for paying their creators in exchange for helping to expand their network. So what could Instagram do to get a piece of the video cake that was beginning to go around? Well, by June of 2012, a new short-form video sharing app by the name of Vine hit the market and by October of that same year it was bought by Twitter. This app gave Instagram a lucrative idea, so by 2013 Instagram had announced the ability to share up to 1 minute of video clips to your followers on their platform.
At the same time that Vine was released in 2012, Snapchat was also released by December of 2012. Snapchat is still very much used today, but what Snapchat did that no other platform had done yet was find a way to take video and photo and integrate those very media formats as messages. So instead of sending a traditional text or Facebook message, you could send a geo-tagged image or video. This was obviously a much more interactive form of messaging, and as a society that was falling further into interactivity within social media, the idea absolutely took off for Snapchat. Their position in the landscape was even further solidified in 2013 with the release of “Snapchat stories”. Stories were a format that was originally created by Snapchat, and consisted of a universal location where your friends or followers could view a steady stream of video meant to recap what you were doing within the past 24 hours. This included the ability to geo-tag locations, showing exactly where you’ve been, and also included increased support for filters which gave Snapchat more fun tools for users to utilize while updating their followers.
This change in Snapchat shook the whole social media market, because people were viewing stories consistently everyday to stay updated on their favorite influencers, as opposed to viewing their favorite influencers page where they may upload a professionally shot image once a week. This was much more casual, and allowed viewers to better connect and interact with the people and brands they looked up to with the addition of story replies and reactions. By 2014, Snapchat had also fully integrated chat messaging for those who couldn’t immediately send an image or video message, as well as video calling which was a massive game changer since only Facebook as a platform has perfected the ability to video chat as effectively with your friends or followers.
Naturally all of these changes within their competitive circle scared Instagram, so Instagram once again had to make another change in order to stay on top of the game. By 2013, Instagram had created the “Direct” feature as a method of competition against Snapchat. Direct allowed users to message friends and send images privately within your chat, this was obviously a move made by Facebook in hopes of once again taking the crown for the platform of primary interactivity. But this change wasn’t enough for Instagram to overtake Snapchat for one primary reason, Stories by Snapchat still existed and they were too good to be ignored. Snapchat stumbled on a goldmine with stories, and nothing Instagram did seemed to stack up to what Snapchat had been able to do with this feature.
Instagram spent the next 3 years trying to perfect their platform so they could overtake other competitors through sheer perfection of their interface and through massive amounts of user volume. However, in 2013 CEO of Snapchat Evan Spiegel announced that snapchatters were sending 350 million snaps a day, while Instagram had a total of 150 million concurrent monthly users at the time. This number scared Instagram, as it was a tangible representation of the extensive interactivity happening on Snapchat as a platform as opposed to Instagram. This caused a whole slew of changes to happen within Facebook that would ultimately change the Instagram platform as a whole.
In November of 2013, Instagram brought sponsored posts onto their platform. This feature allowed users to advertise their content, similar to YouTube, but for a much lower ad-spend. A user could pay 5 dollars if they simply wanted a larger amount of viewership on their content, and could resubmit a post at any time if they wanted even better analytics later on. This move made it obvious that Instagram was taking the advertising and marketing side of social media very seriously. In 2014 Instagram also added a large amount of editing features to better customize your content. These features included exposure adjustments, color correction, and shadow intensity. By the end of 2014, Instagram had also included a whole suite of analytics tools that would help you to identify and capitalize on audience and demographic targeting, as these insights could tell you whether or not your promotional content was being seen by the right people.
By 2015 Instagram took advertising to another level, taking notes from the already well-made Google formula. Instagram further specialized and customized their ad capabilities by trying to convert Instagram viewership into an external client connection for businesses. This was done through the testing of new features, including new ad formats that prompt a user to take an action outside of the application itself. These actions included app installations, email newsletter signups, and storefront retailer site linking. Facebook was now the only platform besides Google that offered such a wide variety of advertising types, naturally this raised a lot of eyebrows in Instagram’s direction from the business and professional communities.
At the beginning of 2016 Instagram finally made the move that made Google’s advertising so great in the first place. Instagram introduced their improved algorithm, which switched the primary feed from displaying chronological content in your feed, to displaying algorithmically selected content instead. This introduced the era of algorithmic strategizing on Instagram, the same way it had been introduced to Google in the past. Companies began to pull at this algorithm, trying to find ways to manipulate it so that their content could be displayed primarily across the feeds of as many people as possible. Brands and influencers began to abuse hashtags, take advantage of geotagging to gain higher demographic numbers, and uploaded at specific times of the day, specifically with the goal of isolating different metrics that could result in a viral upload. Eventually, every brand and celebrity felt they had a different idea of what worked best, resulting in the social media strategy boom that made Instagram’s advertising even more powerful. As people abused the system more and more in exchange for views, Instagram was constantly collecting data with their algorithm on those uploads and the mass influx of brands that started using their system. All of this data extraction made Facebook’s advertising even more accurate and broadened the platform's horizon for advertising even further.
So where are we now?
Well, Instagram didn’t stay ahead of the game forever. Although they have more utility than ever before, eventually a new platform named TikTok came along and stole their thunder. This Chinese made application featured the ability to view short videos similar to how Vine had done it in the past, except TikTok featured a variety of tools and filters using current generation modern technology that simply didn’t exist in the past. Users could upload sound bits, make videos with various creative tools at their disposal, and could even create filters using new virtual 3d mapping technology that cell phone cameras are now capable of utilizing. This introduced a ton of new capabilities to the previous Vine formula, except much more polished and with the ability to also upload longer 1-3 minute videos. TikTok approached the entertainment space with their quick short video formula, as well as the entertainment space with their longer 3 minute videos. TikTok eventually carried this traction forward and introduced sponsored ads to their platform by 2020.
Today there are 3 primary companies carrying the advertising and viral niche space. These platforms are Facebook, Google, and now TikTok as well. Each platform offers different utility, YouTube still being the king of extended watch time and superior video edits gave Google the edge they needed to keep shorter as well as longer, but skippable, 3 minute video ads. Instagram leads the space in business and influencer showcasing, they also introduced Reels in August of 2020 in an attempt to approach the same space as TikTok. Although they’ve had great success, they have not approached the same level of virality with reels as TikTok’s algorithm has proven capable of doing. TikTok now leads the space in niched advertising due to their unique algorithm. Their algorithm sends videos and ads to a select group of individuals for an hour, garners data from those individuals, and then selects a new group of individuals within the next hour to show the ad to in order to specifically target the correct audience who should see that content. Their unique algorithm has made them the best space for gaining the most views from a single advertisement, should it go viral.
So why is video marketing so lucrative? The answer is both simple and complicated. Now more than ever, every brand and competitor can approach marketing and advertising from an affordable angle. With so many platforms and so many different tools for marketing on each one, the possibilities and options for how you can approach your audience are near endless. The average person can do what once took a whole studio of people to be able to do, and the age of digital ads has proven lucrative enough that some of the largest companies in existence have switched to digital ads primarily instead of television entirely. These changes can’t be ignored, and in an ever-changing world it’s crucial to always take advantage of the resources and tools at your disposal. So why not take advantage of the marketing that technology has enabled us to utilize as well? The complicated part is that since there are so many options, there are also an infinite number of strategies that a company can use to specialize the way they advertise. Some strategies work best for certain niches, and some strategies work best for certain businesses, so it can be just as easy to be overwhelmed as it can be to access the advertising space in the first place.
So is marketing today simpler and more accessible than it’s ever been before? Most certainly, but is it also easier to get lost in all of the options and strategies that exist today? Some would say that it is. Either way, the undeniable truth is that digital advertising and marketing is so effective as an investment that it’s a space every business should try to approach.
SOURCES:
https://online.maryville.edu/blog/evolution-social-media/