New research: Twitter users love to watch, discover and engage with video

Wednesday, 13 May 2015

How do Twitter users currently consume, discover and engage with video? To uncover the answer, we commissioned Research Now to conduct surveys across 14 countries about video usage on Twitter. We spoke to 1,000+ people selected to reflect the demographic profile of each country.

The key U.S. insights in this infographic reveal why Twitter offers an ideal audience for your brand’s video content.

New research: Twitter users love to watch, discover and engage with video

Twitter users love video – especially on mobile

The majority of Twitter users (82%) watch video content on Twitter and most watch on a hand-held screen. A staggering 90% of Twitter video views happen on a mobile device, according to our own internal data. But Twitter users don’t just lean back and watch video; they also lean in to create it. Twitter users are 1.9x more likely to have uploaded a video online (anywhere) than the average U.S. internet user.

What types of video do users want more of on Twitter? Among users that have seen the following types of video content, many would like to see more of the same on Twitter, including breaking news (64%), clips from live sports shows (54%) and clips from TV shows (50%). And Twitter users say they want to see more videos from three top sources: celebrities (45%), other users (40%) and brands (37%).

Twitter users value discovering video content

Twitter is all about discovering relevant and interesting content in the moment. So it’s not surprising that 41% of users believe that Twitter is a great place to discover videos. People also turn to Twitter to be in the know. In fact, Twitter users are 25% more likely than the average consumer to discover video first among their friends.

We also found that consumers use YouTube and Twitter in fundamentally different ways. Most Twitter users (70%) say they only/mostly watch videos that they discover in their timelines. Only 11% say they use search on Twitter to find specific videos.

The inverse is true for YouTube. Just 20% of consumers say they only/mostly watch videos that they discover on YouTube – but 63% say they always/usually use search to find specific videos on YouTube. This finding shows a difference in intent: consumers come to Twitter to discover content they don’t already know about rather than searching for something specific.

Video on Twitter drives engagement

Twitter users prefer a seamless video viewing experience on our platform. An analysis of internal data found that native video on Twitter drives more overall engagement than third-party videos shared on Twitter: 2.5X replies, 2.8X Retweets and 1.9X Favorites.

Our advertisers are also seeing Promoted Video on Twitter drive strong engagement. @PaigeDenim used Promoted Video to take fashion lovers behind the scenes of its spring collection and drove more new visitor traffic to the Paige website from Twitter than any other digital platform. @truTV turned to Promoted Video to change perception among NCAA basketball fans during #MarchMadness, which contributed to a 545% increase in positive brand sentiment, according to data from Crimson Hexagon.

Summary

Video is a powerful medium to share stories, evoke emotion and drive action. That’s why in the past year we’ve invested in new products and tools such as Promoted Video, SnappyTV, mobile video uploads and most recently, Periscope. As our latest research shows, video on Twitter today is mobile, fuels discovery and drives engagement.

In the coming months, we’ll continue to share research insights and success stories to help you make the most of our expanding suite of video solutions.