Video hasn’t killed the text star yet

• New report sees short-form, written content still dominating digital marketing
• 85.9% said site and author ownership of online marketing content is anticipated to become critical in response to Google’s Panda update and influence of Google+

A NEW report by research firm eMarketer has found that use of short-form, written content still outweighs visual assets such as video and photos when it comes to digital marketing efforts.
 
Over two-thirds of online marketers worldwide generated short-form content assets such as blog posts, social media updates, articles and guides—all of which are used in SEO, social media and content marketing.
 
Images, videos and infographics were also used by 38.2%, 35.9% and 25.7% of respondents, respectively, and according to eMarkter, additional data suggested these visual assets were of greatest importance to content marketing programs.
 
YouTube was used for content marketing by 66% of respondents, compared to 49.1% who said they used YouTube for SEO.
 
Video-sharing websites Vimeo, Pinterest and Flickr were also used by more marketers for content marketing than SEO.
 
Yet use of these visual marketing platforms and sites was low relative to social sites that also allow for video and images, namely Twitter and Facebook.
 
Roughly half (48.9%) of marketers used YouTube, and 20.6% were on Pinterest, compared to the 82.7% on Twitter and 87.7% on Facebook.
 
Looking ahead, 69.1% of respondents said they expected Facebook to become the dominant social media platform.
 
In addition, site and author ownership of online marketing content is expected by 85.9% of respondents to become critical in response to Google’s Panda update and the influence of Google+.
 
The report, which used August data from search engine optimization (SEO) software provider, SEOmoz also found that SEO was the most time-consuming yet most used inbound marketing tactic for online marketers worldwide.
 
The research found that 23.9% are spending more than half their time on SEO. Just 7.8% invested similar time in social media marketing and 6.3% in content marketing.
 
To read the full report, click here.