Topical content drives video consumption on Twitter

The use of topical content and text and subtitles to draw viewers’ attention are two of the main drivers for boosting brand performance for video on Twitter. The social media platform has released a new guide based on research to inform marketers and advertisers about the power of creative and targeted brand clips.

Twitter collaborated with Omnicom Media Group (OMG) to test 17 brands across a variety of markets using neuroscience techniques to track the brain activity of users clicking through content on their timelines. In a blog post detailing the results, Twitter Agency Research Manager Lisa Cowie revealed that these techniques were used to generate emotional responses, which are linked closely with personal relevance and purchase intent.

“The Twitter video study highlighted the power of a personally relevant medium like Twitter as a means of driving strong engagement with video content,” said Heather Andrew, CEO of consumer neuroscience enterprise Neuro-Insight.

The first key takeaway is that shorter video content is generally more memorable, as clips lasting 15 seconds or less have a greater chance of driving memory encoding, which is one of the positive emotional responses, compared to those with a run time of 30 seconds or more. This trend is specific to Twitter: more traditional forms of advertising often work better with longer formats.

The effectiveness of shorter videos is due to the scrolling behaviours of users on the social sites, which give brands less time to engage with a user and make a lasting impact. The study also found that having no sound during the first three seconds of a clip doesn’t lead to a different response, though sound is important for all key metrics for users consuming an entire clip.

Twitter also delved deeper into the creative process of making videos and how brands can optimise their videos to get more people watching. The inclusion of topical content, for example, leads to much higher completion rates. It is 32 per cent more likely to be consumed after the initial phase, and the use of text and subtitles also appears to draw users’ attention, as this leads to 28 per cent higher completion rates.

Finally, Twitter found that users are much more receptive to viewing content at the top of their timelines, which suggests that they may get fatigued when scrolling further down. The first video sees a 22 per cent uplift for all metrics.