Video in advertising and content Marketing is a big deal and it's getting bigger. For that reason, we decided to focus on video this week; covering how long your videos should be, what are important stats about video content and how (and why) you should use live-streaming.

In addition, we found good articles that explain how to optimize Facebook posts, how Shopify is building it's brand with content marketing and how a prominent B2B marketing VP purchases software (this last one helped us to improve our own acquisition strategy with great results so far).

Video Marketing

How Long Should Your Videos Be? Ideal Lengths for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube [Infographic]

There are many articles covering best posting times, best image sizes and annotation lengths for social media. However, there were way too few good articles about best practices for video on social media, which is weird considering the significance video gained in social marketing over the past couple years.

This HubSpot post gives a quick reference to the optimal video lengths on the main social networks and confirms our findings (though we only checked Facebook and Twitter).

When a video pops up on your Facebook feed, what do you usually do first? My guess is that you take a peek at its length, ponder whether it's worth your time, and let that thought process influence whether or not you press play...

Read the full article on blog.hubspot.com

127 Video Marketing Stats You Probably Didn't Know [Infographic]

This infographic is long (the sources section alone is the size of an infographic). We usually try to choose shorter infographics but this one does give a 360-view of video which thought makes sense.

The infographic goes over the history of video on the web, demographic stats, video usage, growth and many sections about video marketing. For marketers only starting with video, this infographic is a good stepping stone into video marketing.

Did you know about 48 hours of videos are uploaded every minute on YouTube and using a video in your marketing increases the sharing of your content 10x...

Read the full article on socialmediatoday.com

Live-Streaming for Business: How, When, and Why You Should Use It [Infographic]

It isn't yet clear how significant live-streaming will become but many organizations seem fascinated with it. While there's surely interest, marketers are still struggling to come up with relevant business use cases to introduce live-streaming strategically.

If you wondered about the place of live-streaming in marketing or considered experimenting with it, this infographic is for you.

Technology has taken over the art of communication. The first television was invented in 1927; today, it's possible to watch a live event on a palm-sized device using the internet...

Read the full article on salesforce.com

Sales

How I Buy – Joe Chernov, VP Marketing at InsightSquared

In August Steve Woods, a CTO at Nudge Software shared a viral article on LinkedIn about how he buys software. This started a series of articles where prominent executives share how they and their teams make a purchase decision.

In this post, Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at InsightSquared (foremrly VP of Marketing at HubSpot), shares his decision making process.

We used some insights from the article to adjust our strategy and got immediate results. So if you're into software sales, lead generation and marketing, this article is a must.

I find out what’s “out there” for marketing purchases similar to the way I find out what’s happening in the news — my job is to curate a trusted network...

Read the full article on linkedin.com

Content Marketing

How Shopify is Building a $389 Million Brand with Content

Shopify is doing a great job with content marketing and it's one of the main components behind their 55% growth over the past year.

This post sheds some light on the elements that make Shopify's content marketing successful. The whole post good but it's also very long and dives deep into specifics about webinars. So if you're short in time then read only points 1-4 as they present the main insights to take away from this article.

Shopify is on a roll. In the past 12 months alone they've increased their paying customers by 55% to 377,500...

Read the full article on blog.wishpond.com

Social Media

The 5 Key Ingredients of a Perfect Facebook Post

The article's title is pretty much self explanatory and as implied it presents the key aspects behind a successful Facebook post. We liked the post because it present all the important factors for publishing on Facebook in a concise and simple way.

There is no perfect Facebook post, but there is such a thing as a perfect Facebook post for your brand...

Read the full article on blog.hootsuite.com