By Chris Lee

Video marketing is huge. The world’s largest online video hosting site YouTube receives 490 million unique users each month, while an estimated 150 years-worth of video is consumed on Facebook each day. Coupled with its increased value for search marketing, it is no surprise that many marketers are turning to online video to promote their products and services.

Marketers need to understand when their video content is being commented on or shared online and measure the reaction to that content. To address this growing concern, two major video marketing players have entered into a collaboration to help marketers better track and analyse social video reactions.

Who’s watching what and where?

OpenAmplify, a technology company that specialises in natural language processing and text analysis, has partnered with online video marketing services provider Kantar Video to create the ‘Videolytics Social”. The two companies said that the platform will enable marketers to track online and mobile video ads and content, while analysing the social discussion around specific client video during and after its airing. Analysis includes sentiment tracking, topics being discussed, the actions viewers are considering, and the ability to view aggregated comments.

The partnership will mean that at a dashboard level within the Videolytics platform, marketers can now view metrics on: the number of comments and reactions any video has created across the main social media platforms, which social platforms are creating the most engagement, the number of shares and embeds, sentiment ratings down to a URL level, including embed and re-posted video, plus which topics are being most discussed.

Measure for measure

Mark Redgrave,OpenAmplify’s CEO, said: “Brands and advertisers are crying out for more dynamic ways to measure and dimension earned media, and Kantar Video is joining the dots here. For the first time, marketers can not only verify that their video is getting in front of the right audience, but also find out exactly what those people thought about it: what parts of the message they picked up on, which bits they loved, what they weren’t so keen on, who they shared it with, and what they intend to do as a result of that video.”

Kantar said its specialism in tracking and monitoring online video will provide a clear picture of a campaign’s audience and impact. This capability is enhanced by OpenAmplify’s natural language processing technology that uncovers topics that emerge from social discussion around videos distributed across microsites, blogs, social media outlets, digital press releases and elsewhere on the open Web. This combination provides marketers with insight into how audiences react to a campaign, what elements they discuss, and – crucially for marketers - whether the video has incited action.