Find out what is video engagement, why it’s important for modern businesses, and how videos can improve your current venture. Get everything you need to get started with videos.
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Video engagement is a metric that’s usually defined as the amount of interaction a piece of media receives from the audience. Since most video content nowadays is uploaded to platforms like Facebook and Youtube, numerous methods of interaction are included. These can range from views to likes to shares to comments.
Getting video engagement for any business or influencer is important for two specific reasons. First, most platforms use video engagement as the primary metric for their suggestion algorithm. Videos with high audience engagement will be offered to even more people.
Secondly, high audience engagement means the video content is memorable and recognizable, significantly boosting brand visibility. Both of these aspects of video engagement benefit the business in the end.
As video engagement is the measuring stick of the quality of your content, being able to measure and implement strategies to improve it is important. Since video content, when compared to other forms, is still relatively new, it will be harder to find best practices and settled debates on how to understand engagement.
On an analytical level, however, video engagement can be separated into two categories - active and passive. The former includes various interaction methods that require some level of effort from the viewer such as, likes, comments and shares.
Passive video engagement should be understood as everything that happens without additional interaction from the viewer. These metrics will include view counts, average view length, sound on/off settings, and a few others.
Before heading off to a more in-depth analysis of the possible metrics, it should be noted that you should establish a baseline video engagement rate. Otherwise, it would be hard to understand how much of an improvement you’re making over time.
In most cases, comments, and likes (or any equivalent of that) will be the most important active video engagement metrics. These are direct signals about the value and popularity of your content.
Out of these three, comments are the most important metric on almost all video sharing platforms and social media websites as they promote continued dwell time. Reading comments, in other words, has a positive effect on average view time.
Additionally, almost all social media websites have auxiliary interaction methods. Instagram adds “saves” to video engagement metrics while LinkedIn measures click-through rate if there are any links anywhere around the video content.
Measuring how much of an impact these network-unique interaction metrics will have is extremely difficult. You should always aim to get them trending upwards and not worry about them much more.
Essential active engagement metrics:
Video views, average watch time, video impressions and some others can be treated as passive metrics. Users don’t interact with the content directly other than consuming it.
While active engagement metrics are a signal for the popularity and value of your content, passive engagement metrics are a signal for the quality of the content. According to research, nearly 90% of people online are so-called “lurkers” who don’t engage in conversations.
As a result, passive video engagement metrics are a great way to get a pulse of the lurker-side of the internet. In turn, insights into audience retention and overall interest in the video content can be better understood through passive metrics.
Essential passive engagement metrics:
Providers of video solutions now usually enable users to create live streams where they can interact with the audience directly. While most of the above principles apply to live engagement, features such as a chat box completely change the nature and effectiveness of the process.
There’s a trade-off with live videos - less control over the production (e.g., can’t communicate internally and off-camera, no scripts, etc.), but greater interaction with the customer base. Agents can deliver product showcases, answer questions and objections, and make accurate recommendations, all of which are significantly harder through regular videos.
As such, live videos are likely to be the future of video-based conversions. They might be harder to get into due to the loss of control over production, but they, essentially, bring thousands of people into a close-knit interaction, allowing agents to provide a much more human touch to the service.
All of the video engagement measures and principles still apply. Live videos have viewers, length, comments (in the form of a chat, usually), likes and every other metric. As such, measuring the video engagement of a live stream isn’t that much different.
It should be noted, however, that there are some differences. Video engagement rates can suffer if, for example, live streams are not publicized or appear at times where website traffic is low. As such, creating a long-term live stream schedule is the first important part of measuring video engagement.
Otherwise, data acquired through metrics would be muddy and any conclusions derived from it would amount to guesswork.
Video engagement, while not well-defined, is relatively easy to measure. Most of the metrics you’d want to track are available through the associated video or social media platform. You’ll be able to find all of the important statistics through their dedicated dashboard and track video engagement with ease.
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