Distribution is elemental to success for publishers in today's modern media landscape. Those publishers who fail to realize the potential of the various social platforms and do not program specifically and individually for each platform are destined for trouble. Having the appropriate strategy in place to post to each platform requires understanding the audience you want to reach, how they use a given social platform and what type of content works. It's true for NatGeo and WSJ on Snapchat, Buzzfeed and NowThis on Facebook, and AJ+ on Twitter. In this talk, Rahul Chopra, CEO of Storyful and Global Head of Video for News Corp, will discuss why you need a channel strategy and touches on proven strategies for success.
Video is by far the dominant and preferred way people consume content online.
Every media organizations faces their own challenges with video. Whether it be how you source video, create it or shoot it.
You probably ask yourself regularly who you need to be working with, how do you publish to social, what’s next.
When it comes the notion of video shortage, it’s not a shortage of actual video assets but of quality video for your platforms…FOR YOUR AUDIENCE.
The challenge is using the video available to you the right way so it grabs the people you want it to grab. Whether that’s UGC, b-roll or live.
Answering audience demands for video is really about creating quality content for that platform.
Shout out to Ben Mathews at Bessemer for the image.
And if you’re like me, you’re likely have business showing you charts like this one.
They are seeing the revenue potential of video.
And the data you’re collecting internally is leading to the same conclusions.
This is a glimpse into what Buzzfeed is seeing on their own platforms.
So you’re asking yourself how do you align your business.
And, for many people, it hasn’t quite penetrated your editorial team.
How do you motivate those teams to create visual content with same level of rigor that they do the written word.
Like Buzzfeed.
But it’s not about video strategy or editorial strategy. It’s about content strategy.
Because it’s very possible that video will soon be the only meaningful way we reach audiences.
This is global data from Cisco and the bottom dark blue is the amount of data consumed for video.
In short, it’s our north star as publishers.
But first you have to understand your opportunity. There is no one size fits all solution and you have to look to your own data to understand your opportunity.
Buzzfeed sees data like this and create their entire content strategy around produce video that will drive engagement of Facebook.
For example, in today’s world, all of us have to answer the question, is it a facebook world, a youtube world or both?
For those who don’t recognize these charts, this is from a co-authored study between Nielsen and Facebook discussing the best practices and methods gaining attention with video on Facebook.
And, yes, it’s directed at marketers but they are also telling us, publishers, how to be successful on Facebook with video.
Or take the case of what John Steinberg is doing for business news for younger audiences at Cheddar.
Five years ago at the WSJ, we were thinking about this. But we didn’t know how video would evolve online or on mobile. We were early to content strategy but so was Buzzfeed, NYT, BBC and a host of other people.
You have to evolve with platforms.
The fact of the matter is that there’s a tremendous amount of content being created, consumed and interacted.
• 80% of online content is now UGC
• 400 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute
• 8bn video views on Facebook daily
• 7bn video views on Snapchat daily
• The top 100,000 YouTubers upload new videos at least twice a day
And that impacts all of us and has to be taken into account when we creating our content strategy.
And without a doubt, you have to account for UGC.
It’s the world’s largest natural resource for publishers and it’s changed the way people communicate.
It’s changed the way we need to communicate to get people’s attention.
We entered the age of what we call “Democratized Storytelling”. Anyone could share their story with the world and many did.
And it’s a created a real problem.
We have to compete with all that content to gain the attention and time of our audiences.
And the reason we feel we need to compete is because there has been a race to the bottom for many when it comes to quality for video content.
But the opportunity is there.
The first step to answering the demand for more video is creating a cohesive video strategy.
You need to start with your data and then you need to think about the audience you want to reach.
Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for pain.