Refreshing Your Social Video Strategy In 2022

For many people, the new year presents an opportunity to take stock of past learnings and changes for the upcoming year. As marketers, we face the same opportunity to evaluate and revamp advertising strategies. This article seeks to explain why refreshing your social video ad strategy is a great place to start.

Paid Social Isn’t Going Anywhere

Paid social has incredible scale and value as a media channel for advertisers – its influence continues to grow with 96 million people expected to push the ‘add to cart’ button via a social platform this year, up from 90 million in 2021. Measuring and attributing these sales, however, has become a taller mountain to climb in recent months thanks to iOS 14.5 and App Tracking Transparency (ATT). The iOS update from Apple introduced the ATT framework, which requires apps on iOS devices to ask for permission to collect and share a user’s data. Users are opted out of this tracking by default, requiring additional steps for them to opt in and agree to each app’s tracking. The impact of mass amounts of opted out users is significant, with Facebook acknowledging that conversions are likely being undercounted by 15% and that the social media giant has lost a significant number of behavioral signals to optimize against. Additionally, the meteoric rise of viral apps like TikTok has altered what users expect from video content and ads altogether.

So, what’s a marketer to do? See below for a list of tips of how to start refreshing your paid social video strategy in 2022.

Refresh your content to feel more native and less formal

If you don’t have a Super Bowl-sized creative budget, don’t worry. More brands are adapting creative to be less formal, lowering tech to mimic the types of user generated videos that people find more engaging.

• Deploy some cost-effective “lo-fi” video production methods or selfie views to make content feel more organic. Keep the narrative moving quickly – but be sure to introduce your product or brand right away.
• If video resources are tight, micro- and nano- influencers (defined as having a following between 5K and 100K) are making a comeback on social and can produce that organic content on your behalf. And because their prices are not typically based on followership, you can mix and match to fit your budget. Capitalize on their small but loyal followings to expand your audience naturally, another way of circumnavigating increasingly limited targeting.

Test new platforms to expand reach and diversify your video channel mix

If you’re a Meta (formerly Facebook) or YouTube loyalist, there’s no reason to abandon these platforms this year. But there’s also no reason to not test new social media channels to expand your reach.

• Consider dipping your toe into video-first platforms like Snapchat and TikTok, which feature different audience data segments and ad delivery algorithms that could better suit your target audience. Advertisers in the home improvement, travel, fashion, and beauty verticals are particularly well suited for TikTok – users are already raising their hand for videos within these categories, and the algorithm makes it easier to share and see relevant products that have been fueling the “TikTok made me buy it” trends
• Look into Pinterest and its keyword targeting capabilities. Pinterest is the fourth largest social media giant ­– trailing Facebook, Instagram and now TikTok – and of these four it is the only platform to feature keyword targeting based on user searches within the platform. This inherently makes it appealing to users who are raising their hand to find advice and solutions to their questions. This, coupled with video ad units, has the potential to become a key (and consistent) traffic driver to your site.

Optimize for and remarket based on actions taken on platform

With conversion tracking significantly limited across paid social giants like Facebook, evaluate your objectives and test which on-platform metrics can serve as a proxy for onsite actions. Because this approach is measured by pixels, it will also help mitigate the impact of ATT.

• Video is particularly well suited to drive brand and product awareness. But if you’re not looking to put all your eggs in the awareness basket yet on social alone, no problem. You can still evaluate video’s ability to drive users to the website via link clicks. It’s also possible to measure engagement rate, view rate, and view duration as proxy metrics for lower funnel metrics.
• One outcome of ATT is limitations on audience pools for retargeting, but video can help supplement site visitor retargeting data loss if you want to re-message users who have seen some or all of your video. Advertisers can build retargeting groups based on how long a user viewed a video ad, bolstering remarketing segments without the need for pixel-based website action data by re-messaging users who have shown interest or engagement with video creative.

Even if social video ads are not a significant portion of your current media mix, these cost-effective strategies can be applied to help update or reframe your video strategy – without significantly altering your media budgets. Now is a great time to review your social video content, channel mix, and objectives to increase engagement and lift your brand presence across new audiences.