5 Ways Google+ Will Drive Social Video Growth

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Chris Schreiber is director of marketing at social video advertising company Sharethrough. Before joining Sharethrough, Chris worked in the Global Communications and Public Affairs Department for Google, helping design and execute communications strategy for key consumer applications and social media initiatives.

The new set of features offered by Google+ represents the next chapter for the social web, helping it move from a platform that facilitates conversation and content sharing to a mechanism that can deliver much deeper social experiences. This new forum for creating connected audiences will pay off big for brands that create great video content.

In particular, Google+ is opening up a number of different opportunities for brands to get their videos seen and shared. It’s quite possible that we will look back on the Google+ launch as a landmark moment for social video advertising, because of the new possibilities it created for people to share, co-view, chat and text about entertaining videos.

Here are five ways Google+ will help the social video industry.

While some have taken advantage of Facebook’s features to segment their personal friend network, many have let their friend pool remain one large network with whom they share everything.  This means that when they share a video on Facebook, it goes out to a very broad audience, which includes many people who won’t be interested. Some of us may also hesitate to share a video if it means that everyone in our network — including family and even co-workers — will see it.
The Google+ “Circles” feature, which offers an intuitive way to segment your friend groups, will ease the process of sharing creative brand videos with groups that you know will appreciate them. While I would normally be a little reluctant to share a video as absurd as Skittles Moneyshot with my widely varied Facebook friends, my newly created “Social Video Junkies” Google+ circle will appreciate it.

The Google+ Hangouts feature allows for live video chat in the same “room” as multiple friends.  Hangouts’ tight integration with YouTube allows for genuinely new social video group experiences.

We all love sharing hilarious videos with friends. The only thing better than getting comments on your Facebook feed or via email is to hear people’s laughter and reactions live, “in person.” Hangouts will offer a new real-time, collaborative viewing experience for social video campaigns, which will massively amplify the benefits of these videos for the brands that create them.

Now imagine you have created a Hangout with friends. You’re all hysterically laughing at a video together, but one of your friends is not online to join. Google+’s “Huddle” feature now comes into play. With Huddle, you can text groups of people or individual friends via the Google+ mobile app to let them know you’re gathering to watch a video.  When friends receive a new message in Huddle, Google+ sends a push notification to their phone.
Huddle stands to be a really interesting way to extend conversations that start at the desk and move into the mobile space. It’s a great way to connect a disparate audience around a good piece of content.

Data is king at Google. The Google+ Business profiles already promise to include deep analytics, and while little has been announced as yet, one can imagine that powerful new types of social data insights will become available to advertisers about their YouTube campaigns.

By providing rich data capabilities, Google+ could allow advertisers to gather new insights on the quantity and quality of sharing for their campaigns. Google+’s new collaborative features could also introduce interesting new data categories for advertisers, such as average co-viewing view length (how long a group watched a brand’s video together) versus individual view length stats or engagement metrics via Huddle (mobile) versus Hangouts (desktop). 

While the relationship between the +1 button, Google+ and Google Search is still being sorted out (probably even by Google itself), there are clearly going to be opportunities for advertisers to boost their search results with videos that go viral. Whether content is surfaced based on the +1s of people in your circles or through broad social sentiment around search results, popular social video campaigns stand to gain more search relevance as users interact with it. And once a great video gets discovered, Hangouts and Huddles are sure to follow.

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Mashable is the largest independent online news site dedicated to covering digital culture, social media and technology. With more than 50 million monthly pageviews and 3.6 million followers across social media, Mashable has one of the most engaged online news communities. Founded in 2005, Mashable is headquartered in New York City with an office in San Francisco.

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