How to make 2018 Video Trends work for you

It’s almost December so we’re into that time of the year for ‘best of this year’s’ and ‘next year’s top tips’ lists. I’m not quite ready to look back into 2017, instead, let's look forward to some of the video trends for 2018 and how you can use them in your own video content.

Live streaming
We’ve completed more live streaming videos this year than ever before, and this will continue to grow based on the bookings we already have for next year.
The growth over the past year has been possible due to the range and scope of platform support, plus the unique content it produces.
With Facebook, Twitter and Instagram supporting and encouraging live video, it’s gone from a ‘nice to have’ to an ‘essential’ part of video content marketing.
It increases engagement with your customers, plus creating exposure for your content to a larger audience as all the platforms, especially Facebook push live video to a wider audience than standard video.
One of the other elements making live streaming so popular is the ability for viewers to interact. If you want to create more engagement for Q&A video, live stream on Facebook, with rather than the interviewee just answering pre-prepared questions, they can react to new questions which might develop on a tangent from the original subject matter.
With this style of live streaming, you can increase engagement as people feel involved and more like to share.

think mobile for your video ratios, keep it square and seen
Mobile and Square
We’ve already covered the importance of ‘new’ video ratios in another post, and this ties into the increase of video consumed on the move and mobile based. On average half of all video views during this year were from mobile devices with that figure expected to continue to rise during 2018.
Any video you plan or create must consider the way that the content will be viewed as part of the pre-production process. Even though mobile screens are getting bigger and bigger, they are never going to rival a laptop screen or desktop monitor, and often social platforms will automatically crop your videos.
Using a square aspect ratio allows your video to take up more screen real estate, and this will improve your views and in turn your engagement of the video and your page. If you decide to go with the standard aspect ratio (16:9) consider how the video will look if it gets cropped, or is shrunk to fit the width and therefore will be shorter in height.

don't autoplay, remember to add subtitles to get maximum views
Muted Videos
We’ve all visited a website where without warning a video starts to play either really loudly, or inappropriately and potentially NSFW!
From January Google will be rolling out their updated Chrome browser which will mute the auto-play video, including adverts, probably the worst offenders.
Most people will see this as a massive jump forward, but if you’re producing video content you might not. If your video might be used as an advert or a video banner for a site and will have a voiceover as part of it, consider how else you can convey that information prior to making the video.
Could you have the spoken content visually represented? Maybe a graphical representation, with motion graphics instead of an interview. If you are interviewing someone, and need to show them even if you can’t always hear them, consider adding your own subtitles rather than relying on closed captions being produced by the video hosting solution.
For example, closed captions produced by YouTube can be quite clunky and won’t necessarily going to be on brand with your corporate imagery.

Trends are always expanding, sucking in new ideas and technology, 2018 will also be the year for 360, VR, and AR, do you have ideas on what you would like to do with them? Let us know!

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