In early 2017, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said to his investors, “I see video as a megatrend.” He wasn’t wrong. There is currently an explosion of video content, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. In fact, more video content is uploaded online in 30 days than the major U.S. television networks have created in 30 years.

By 2019, 80% of the world’s online traffic will be video. Developers already caught up with the trend a long time ago. With the massive success of social media sites like Vine, we all got our first real peek into the viral power of videos. Since then, all major social networks have made big changes to provide a good video experience for their users.  

Thanks to these changes, several businesses have been able to reach millions of dollars in revenue using video content on social media.

Individuals have also been able to build personal brands off their influence and generate several streams of income.

Here are social networks we expect to not just stay up-and-running in 2019 but to increase the margin for engagement and visibility users enjoy when they upload video content.

7 Best Social Networks for Video Content in 2019

1. YouTube

YouTube will continue its reign as the biggest platform to upload and watch videos. It is not just the biggest video library in the world, but also the 2nd largest search engine placed right after Google. Regardless of who your audience is, they most likely use YouTube. YouTube contains such diverse content that it draws in ⅓ users of the internet. That’s over a billion active users, with a small fraction being your target audience.

Your business is probably not interested in monetizing your views, so you can focus on pulling in high-quality traffic, as opposed to high-volume traffic. The key is to create content around what your audience is looking for.

If you’re making up video ideas and assuming your audience will love it, you won’t go far with video marketing on YouTube. Your content must be created around what they are actively searching for. You can learn what your target audience is searching for by using keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner and Moz Keyword Explorer.

2. Instagram

Instagram has taken many leaps in adapting its features for better video optimization. Beyond regular posts to the feed, we have Instagram Stories to upload images and videos for 24 hours, Instagram Live to live stream your events or day-to-day activities, and IGTV for long-form 1-hour video content.

Instagram is currently the best social media platform for video marketing in all of its forms. However, before diving head first into it, you should understand that users engage with each of these video features in different ways. Depending on your industry, a lot of testing and user feedback will be needed to determine what works best for you.

3. Medium

Medium is popularly known as the self-publishing platform for everyone to share their opinion on everything. As of May last year, Medium reported a count of 60 million unique readers. The platform itself takes a democratic approach; it’s very inclusion-based, and it’s structure encourages users to share their disruptive views.

Medium recently included a mobile-first feature called Series, where publishers can create picture or video series, instead of writing articles. Unlike every other app with a ‘Stories’ feature, they don’t expire after 24 hours. The aim of Medium Series is to develop a story over time, expanding it loop by loop.

While creating content for Medium, keep in mind that their users expect top quality stuff. A majority of their audience is educated, and work in fields related to communication and technology. If your target audience is within this scope, then Series is a good way to promote your visibility to/engage with them.

4. Facebook

For the first time, Facebook saw a decline in usage this year. However, this hasn’t affected the power of connecting with your target audience on the world’s largest social media platform.

In 2016, a Facebook executive predicted that the platform would be all video in 5 years.

Now, they offer users two ways to publish video content. There’s the Stories option, which allows you to publish images and short videos to your feed for 24 hours. There’s also the option to publish videos to your timeline. With both features, Facebook provides analytical data to measure impressions, number of views, engagement, and so on.

5. LinkedIn

Like many other social networks, LinkedIn has made changes to not just integrate video, but make it one of the top features available. If you’re a B2B or B2C company with an audience base of corporate workers, business owners, and freelancers, there’s no better time to start publishing videos on LinkedIn like now.

The LinkedIn algorithms are still pushing video content to the top, so any publisher who consistently shares high-quality, engaging videos is bound to get a lot of visibility there.

6. Snapchat

There’s a general assumption that Snapchat isn’t relevant anymore, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. This report on TechCrunch from the second quarter of 2018 shows that Snapchat currently has 188 million active monthly users.  If your target audience’s age group is anywhere below 25 years, then it’s not time to give up on Snapchat yet.

With their recent successful increase in revenue and a quarter of a billion dollars investment by a new partner, we’re hoping for new developments.

7. Your mobile app

Although they are not social networking platforms, every service based app promotes some level of engagement between brand and user. If your business already has a mobile app available to your consumers, then it should also be optimized for video content.

This report showed that when video and text are available on the same subject, 72% of users prefer to learn through video. Everything from product demos, how-to guides, and FAQs should be created and made available. If the video content is too much data for the size of your app, then you can include an interface where users can see the videos available, click on them, and get redirected to the platforms where they have been published. There are several benefits to creating a mobile app, and the ability to give users a visual, hands-on guide to your services should be one of them.

With the right social networks to reach your target audience, your brand can cut-down on marketing dollars spent on advertising, while increasing its ROI from video marketing. What social networks will you focus your video content efforts on in 2019?