Every year the popularity of online video is increasing, doesn’t matter the platform (tablet, smartphone, smart TV, or computer) or the length (while short videos are still most popular, there is a huge potential for long form video) by all measures, popularity heading straight up with no indication of slowing down anytime soon. In fact, the popularity of online video increasing so much that there are more advertisers who want to place ads in videos than there are videos to place the ads on. If you’re not planning on using video yet this year, here are 6 reasons why you will (or should) use video in 2013:

“User Curated Content Networks” Love Video

You can read “user curated content networks” as Pinterest right now, but Pinterest is just the first network of its kind, not the last. Pinterest users are adding more than just photos to their boards now and video is right up there with photos now in popularity. Now that brands and companies can have their own Pinterest accounts and boards (officially), using video to not only profile your company but to show off products, how tos, and demos is a great way to leverage user curated social sharing. Keep in mind, sites like Pinterest often let users cross-post to Facebook, so when your content is pinned on one network, it often jumps to other networks as well.

SEO

According to Marketing Profs, Google and YouTube aren’t just favoring sites that have video, but also sites and publishers who have videos that are watched more and watched longer:

Google and YouTube are always changing their search algorithms for video (and for everything else), seeking the best ways to present information that searchers will find relevant. In October, YouTube announced that it would rank videos based on “watch time,” giving prominence to videos that are watched for a longer stretch of time than those viewed for a few seconds.
-Via Marketing Profs

Creating a video that people watch all the way to the end can be tricky, but videos in the 3–5 minute range are the most watched videos and videos between 30–60 seconds have the best completion rates (watching the entire video).

More Than Just YouTube: Newsletters and Other Material

Vimeo and YouTube are the two leading sites for publishing your videos and both have excellent options for embedding your videos in places other than just your website. How about a video intro in your next e-newslettter? Providers like MailChimp make embedding videos as easy as copy and paste. Not a bad way to engage newsletter subscribers right off the bat.

eCommerce: Videos Help Sell More Stuff

Telling people about something is one thing. Showing them a picture is another. Showing a video of something is class of its own. Having video as part of your ecommerce strategy has shown to increase sales over 90% compared to not having video.

Product Videos Are Engaging and Sharable

When you see a product demonstrated in a video it makes more of an impact than if you just show a picture alone. Tied in with Pinterest-like sites and ecommerce, using video to show your product or service can have a tremendous impact on customers and clients. Don’t relegate “products” to just physical items either, think about a short video profiling your business as a “product video” as well. Engage and connect with people by telling them more than what words and pictures alone can say.

Mobile Video is Exploding

As mobile networks are getting faster and devices are getting more powerful, people are watching more and more video on their mobile devices. Almost 60% of all mobile data traffic in 2012 was for video and mobile comprised 13% of all Internet traffic last year…and it’s still growing. The amount of video consumed on “non-PC devices” grew 6 times from Q4 2011 to Q4 2012.

Bonus: It’s More Affordable

Maybe the biggest reason you’ll start using video this year is that it’s more affordable than ever. Don’t relegate having a video to the “nice to have” list, put it at the top of the “need to have” list in your marketing plans. Learn more about SoMedia’s ScalableVideo and VideoBuilder services and how they can help you use video in all the ways above, and save you money too.

Photo from Flickr by jsawkins.