4 Facts About The Consumer Tech Social Video Landscape That Will Surprise You

The latest iPhone is peeking over the horizon, new handsets from Nokia and Samsung are on the way, and the highly-contested next generation games consoles are about to hit the market – yep, ‘tis the season for consumer tech.

With hype and predictions coming from every side, video technology company Unruly decided to gather some hard facts on the consumer tech landscape as it stands. The social video world is massive – 500,000 branded videos are shared each day – and analyzing its trends reveals a lot about a brand’s wider influence.

The social marketing specialists collated thousands of ads, comparing smartphone against smartphone, tablet against tablet, games console against games console, to learn what social video has to say about the year’s biggest tech battles.

So is Apple really still king of the hill? Is Samsung catching up? Is the Sony PS4 or the Microsoft Xbox One leading the charge? Prepare to be surprised.

To read the full report, click here.

1) Apple is underperforming

Or at least its social video strategy is. Sifting through hundreds of smartphone ads, Unruly discovered that Apple ads account for only 9.4% of all smartphone video shares.

Compare this to competitors Samsung, who lead the pack with 53.4% of shares, and Nokia (17.4%), and the iPhone maestros start to look fairly shaky. Given its history of iconic ad campaigns, Apple’s lacklustre sharing record is something it really should address ahead of the launch of the new iPhone.

2) Newer is not always better

With more videos being shared every day, you’d expect that new products would always have a larger social footprint than older ones. In the case of the iPhone 5, this simply isn’t true.

Comparing ads for the iPhone 4s and 5, we found that the older model garnered 2.5 times more shares than the newer version. What’s more, only 1 in 56 people who watched iPhone 5 ads were compelled to share them, compared to 1 in 10 for the iPhone 4s.

3) Sony’s PS4 dominates Microsoft’s Xbox One (for the moment)

Thanks to controversy surrounding Xbox One’s sharing policy, plus some brilliant real-time marketing by Sony, the PS4 has taken a robust lead in the next-gen console race.

Comparing ads for both systems, Sony’s PS4 accounts for an incredible 90% of shares and 91% of views. This is bad news for Microsoft, but with only vague rumours of release dates circulating, they may have time to pull it around.

4) BlackBerry takes the prize on shares per views

While ads from Samsung dominate overall video sharing in the smartphone market, this is partly due to the sheer number of videos launched.

Despite an impressive 53.4% of smartphone ad shares, on average it took 35 views for these ads to generate a share.  Social interactions per video are actually declining over time for the South Korean technology giant.

In comparison, BlackBerry’s campaigns received 1 share for every 11 views, putting it ahead of Apple (1:23), Nokia (1:26) and Sony (1:34). The challenge and opportunity for smartphone brands is to find the piece of hero content which maximises user engagement and sharing and drives maximum ROI from their paid media strategy.