If you’re active on social media, you’ll often see that videos shared by others take up much of your news feed—by 2017, video traffic will take up 67% of all consumer web traffic. Social video can help your brand with engagement to consumers because brains process visual content 60,000 times faster than text—this is especially important as consumers are inundated with all sorts of content, and visual content such as videos can make more of an impact than text. If you plan to use social video and jump to the front of the line to grab the attention of your audience, this infographic, which summarizes many key video marketing statistics, can show you how to get started:

YouTube seems to be the default choice for businesses to host their videos, but they should also consider other options such as Vimeo, Google Hangouts, Instagram and Vine to host videos and get their content out to as many people as possible.

There are a few main takeaways to keep in mind about these video content platforms.  While YouTube is currently the easy choice to upload video content, the above platforms are all growing fast; it’s important you keep up to meet your customers where THEY are! While Google Hangouts is more appropriate for companies trying to engage in B2B marketing, Instagram is more useful for companies trying to meet consumers rather than other businesses (B2C).  Even though Vimeo is beautiful, successful marketing on “YouTube’s cousin” will cost you; but a pro subscription will give you search engine visibility, advanced tracking and statistics as well as a customizable and brandable video player. Overall, Vine currently seems to be the toughest social video platform to market on due to countless videos that rarely gain traction.

Special thanks to tollfreeforwarding(dot)com for their contributions!