It is January 2025 and Marketing Agencies, and Social Media Gurus are putting out the Social Media Trend changes to look out for this year.
It is almost dizzying trying to keep up with the latest trends and #tags to keep your marketing on or ahead of the curve.
What if there is 1 social trend that has not changed for the last 10 years, and will probably not change for the next 10, will you grasp at it?
You may have already have guessed what this trend is…
Human-Centred Videos
What??!
Human-Centred Videos are stories about people and how their world view, perspectives, or lives have been changed due to a life-altering event.
In Marketing and Sales, they present themselves as Case Studies, Testimonials, Brand Culture Videos, Employee Culture videos, etc.
YouTube was designed, from the beginning, to allow anyone to share pretty much anything.
The Social Trend that kept people watching were videos about other people doing things or telling their stories.
The majority of videos that were effective were about people doing entertaining things, or have an interesting story to share.
The social media landscape has ballooned since. However, every platform has tended towards improving their video offerings to allow content creators to share videos.
And overwhelmingly, human-centred videos are the ones that do well on all these platforms.
Human-Centred Social Video Trend
Many of us will remember, the likes of “Charlie Bit My Finger” and @NatalieTran “CommunityChannel” that lead the viral video social trend in the mid to late 2000s.
Fast forward 15 years, and you have the Influencer Culture built on the Social Trend of the Cult of Personality. People talking about stuff, and their experiences with stuff, leading others to base decisions on these influencers.
What about the next 10 years?
As GenAI takes off, and eventually the novelty fades, we will see a return to human-centred stories.
How do I know? We have seen this trend over the last 25 years.
For a moment, marketing animation videos were all the rage. Then when CGI character animations became cost effective, the industry was predicting its take over of human presenters and actors.
Both are still around, and both have their uses, but none have taken over the simple effectiveness of stories told by real people. Humans naturally gravitate to another human. Psychologists have posited that it is an evolutionary advantage. Our minds are fine tuned to detect ever subtle nuances in a persons expression to form meaning. Something that CGI Animation, and AI has not been able to truely replicate.
What’s more, this isn’t a new trend.
This Social Trend of human-centred stories goes back as far as human civilisation. The tales of Dreamtime Stories from Australia, Gilgamesh, and Homers’ Odessey, are all the Social Media and Social Trends before Social Media was even a thing.
They are all stories that we can relate to, or aspire to.
Social Media Platforms have just made it easier to create a lot more stories, and made it easier to share them with others.
Ultimately, as mentioned, many of the successful videos are human-centred stories.
Using the Human-Centred Social Video Trend in Marketing
We know that Human-Centred Videos are here to stay. The question now is, how do we make use of it to improve our marketing and sales?
Going back to the principles of what good engaging human stories are, making Social Marketing videos is the same:
- Make your customers the hero of the story by giving them a person they can relate to.
- Show the journey of having a problem, finding a “mentor” (you), then reaching success.
- Reminding the hero of the story that they can always find the “mentor” (again, YOU) when they need help.
You can tell this stories in many ways:
- Case Study Videos (Most powerful)
- Testimonial Videos (Equally Good)
- Audio Interview Case Studies (Great for time poor customers)
- Presentation Style Video (Good place to start)
- Animated Case Studies
- etc.
The whole idea is to use interesting stories to encase:
- Success Stories
- Important information
- key insights
- Business services
- etc
And the hero of each story is always your customer, or potential ones.
It’s both an art and a science, that needs time to discover the best way of doing it.
We have been crafting hero stories for businesses from multinationals to small startup for the past 25 years, and can confidently help tailor specific stories for all types of businesses whether you are B2B or B2C. As long as you are a B2H business (Business to Human), we can help.
A couple of months ago, I interviewed a Marketing Guru, @Irwin Hau, who spoke about the importance and effectiveness of Human Story videos in marketing. You can read and watch that story here.
