By Dez Duran-Lamanilao

Content marketing may prove to be a marketer’s best friend when it comes to creating and sharing quality content about a brand, may it be through text, imagery, or video. Video marketing, when done tastefully and consistently, can establish or strengthen a brand’s identity for better audience engagement.

A survey conducted by Livestream with New York Magazine reveals that 80% of consumers would rather watch live video from a brand and 67% of viewers believe that quality is the most important element when watching a livestream.

Furthermore, the top social media sites have so far been successful in proving that live video is a key factor in content marketing:

  • Over 8 billion videos are watched on Facebook daily.
  • Twitter’s video views increased by more than 200 times from December 2014 to December 2015.
  • More than 500 million hours of videos are seen on YouTube daily.

What should you keep in mind if you want to come up with a great live video for your brand? Here are some of the most noteworthy examples of brands that maximized the advantages of live video marketing:

1. Buzzfeed’s 45-minute live video featuring two people putting rubber bands on a watermelon, one by one, to find out how many rubber bands are needed before the watermelon burst. More than 800,000 viewers watched the video, which continuously piqued the viewers’ curiosities.

        2. Grazia UK’s roundtable debate regarding Brexit in June 2016, which involved audience participation, making the viewers feel that   they were an important part of the debate.

3. Dunkin Donuts’ video on Valentine’s Day in which the brand showed how products are created, with the finale involving the baking of a gigantic, donut-themed wedding cake.

Facebook Live is one of the biggest trends to hit social media and is expected to continue to dominate the digital world of brands. The industry is thriving with a wide range of platforms that small business may want to take advantage of. While you may think that you can forego this strategy to build brand awareness, there may be important milestones that are waiting to be discovered. You just need to make that live video happen.