• by Aaron Baar , May 11, 2016

Consumer Electronics companies looking to take advantage of social video marketing would be wise to focus more on YouTube and less on other social channels. 

According to luxury research company L2, video posts on Facebook and Instagram do not garner any more engagement for consumer electronics brands than static still images. With its tendency toward longer-form video and searchable format, YouTube is a better strategic choice, says Stephen Bradley, managing director at L2.

According to the research, consumer electronics brands that had high quality, long-form content on YouTube had three times the views of brands focused on other video content. For these companies, the average video was three minutes long, and content included tutorials, troubleshooting videos and events (such as Apple’s launch of its most recent iPhones.)

“The consumer electronics space tends to post longer-than-average videos,” Bradley tells Marketing Daily. “People can search for them. All of that lends itself to YouTube.”

On Facebook, where videos are often viewed while scrolling through a news feed, the videos are no more engaging than photos, the research found. Similarly, Instagram -- which is set up to favor still images over video -- also had lower video engagement rates. The one exception: User-generated content. GoPro, which incentivizes users to upload content to its servers, was “one of the few brands to experience greater engagement rates for video than image posts.”

“If you want to deliver top-end of funnel [awareness] that’s fine,” Bradley says of video on Facebook and Instagram. “But if you’re trying to boost engagement, it isn’t going to be any more successful.”

Consumer electronics brands are also struggling (along with everyone else) with what to do on SnapChat. Because the platform favors less polished, more immediate videos that disappear after 24 hours (thus requiring new content constantly), the heavily edited videos favored by consumer electronics companies are a tough sell on the platform. Brands that have succeeded so far, Bradley says, are those that have their accounts “taken over” by social influencers for a period of time. 

“It’s still kind of an open playing field for consumer electronics brands to build an identity of being innovative,” he says. “For brands that figure out how to post video effectively on SnapChat, it can be powerful.”