Video absolutely dominates today’s social media ecosystem, and brands have noticed.
In the quest for users’ attention, video used to be a unique (if expensive) way to stand out. Not anymore—in 2025, 89% of businesses use video in their marketing.
Video is the default language of some social networks (like TikTok) and a major part of all the rest. And while it’s harder to stand out than before, maintaining an active video-first social media presence is as important as ever.
Video is the strongest way to grab users’ attention on social, but not every brand will find success on every platform. Here’s how to determine which platform is the best fit for you.
Why choosing the right video platform matters
If you want to engage the right people and turn more of them into customers, you need high-quality video content. But a great video is virtually worthless until you post it somewhere, and the somewhere you choose makes a big difference in how effective that video will be.
In other words, there’s a reason a DTC beauty brand doesn’t invest in LinkedIn or a B2B SaaS company might not see much value in TikTok. In theory, you could post videos to every major platform. Just one teeny tiny problem: investing in video isn’t cheap.
You’re devoting time, money, and creative effort for every video. And every platform adds more work, since you’ll need differently optimized versions for each one. If you manage multiple accounts or brands, you probably already feel maxed out in terms of video creation and file management.
How to choose the best video platform for your brand
With video content, you can’t post everything, everywhere, all at once(™). And if you’re reading this, the right (and wrong) place to post probably isn’t as obvious as it is for our fictional beauty brand and SaaS company.
Use these four guidelines to think through which video platforms make the most sense for your business and audience.
Start with your social media marketing goals
Picking a video platform should always start with what you want your video to do for you.
Look back at your broader brand or campaign goals. Why are you using video at all on social media platforms? What specific outcomes do you want to see from it?
- Increase brand awareness within a group of people?
- Engage an existing audience or customer base to keep them coming back / signed up / buying more?
- Convert viewers into customers?
- Position your brand as a trusted expert or thought leader?
Different platforms can more effectively help you achieve different kinds of goals. TikTok is great for quick engagement but less effective for deep-dive educational content. On the flip side, YouTube is an ideal home for educational content and building brand loyalty, but it’s a punishing place to try and grow an audience around products or services.
Understand where your target audience spends time
It feels a little meme-y to say that Facebook is for Boomers and TikTok is for Zoomers, but there is some truth in it. Even though social network adoption and use are flattening out a bit, there’s still a stark generational difference.
Some reports show a nearly perfect mirror image of usage by generation. TikTok usage is high among 18–24-year-olds and drops aggressively in each older cohort. Facebook shows the inverse, with high usage among those aged 55–64 and plummeting usage among younger users.
It just makes sense to focus your video effort in the places where your audience hangs out. So spend time evaluating who your audience is and where they spend their time online.
Start by researching platform demographics by age, region, interests, and content preferences, then compare that information to what you know about your audience and customer base.
Sked Social is the perfect tool here, as it helps you analyze past and current social media performance to see exactly where and how viewers are engaging with your content.
Consider the type of content your audience responds to
Video content isn’t all the same. Different formats and types of video content—livestreams, edutainment, user-generated content (UGC), short form, long form—function differently and follow different sets of rules.
There are also fundamental differences between the way the platforms operate:
- TikTok is trends-driven, rewards virality, and often requires attention hacking.
- YouTube is community-driven, helping brands grow and reach a recurring audience.
- Facebook virtually requires paid amplification for branded video content but provides unique opportunities for organic user-generated content.
And here’s the most important thing: your audience won’t respond to all types of content equally well.
So take the time to evaluate what video formats are driving the results you want. Sked Social helps you do this with your own content first, showing you how your reels, stories, and videos are performing on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, so you can compare apples to apples.
Then, Sked Social’s competitor monitoring tools help you understand what is and isn’t working for your competition. You can see at a glance what kinds of content competitors are posting and how engaging that content is.
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Evaluate internal resources and team capacity
Every video platform has production demands:
- Each video has to be the right dimensions and aspect ratio (vertical vs. horizontal) for the platform.
- Some platforms have length limits or may reward or penalize videos outside the platform’s “ideal” length.
- Certain content elements may need to be censored or obscured on one platform (looking at you, TikTok) but not others.
The result of all this: your team has to make multiple cuts of a video to satisfy each platform. But there’s only so much team to go around. So, before you add another social channel, make sure you have the team capacity, training, and tools to put in the amount of effort needed.
Top video content platforms (and when to use them)
For brands and content creators going after social video audiences, these are the top five online video platforms. Here’s what you need to know about each one to choose the best platforms for your needs.
YouTube
YouTube has grown from a place for homegrown videos to, well, an everything platform. It’s a user-friendly search engine with its own SEO strategy, a place for small businesses and influencers to monetize content creation, and a great video hosting platform that allows businesses to embed videos on their own websites.
Users go to YouTube for a mind-boggling range of reasons, from education and information to entertainment and news. And while YouTube has expanded aggressively into short-form videos with YouTube Shorts, it’s still a great home for long-form content, especially educational and how-to videos.
YouTube’s user base is vast, covering every demographic, which can make it an especially attractive digital marketing platform. Just be aware of what you’re up against.
For many, YouTube equals entertainment. You’re competing with their favorite creators and whatever they’re into. Business-oriented content or traditional marketing pieces might not entice the average YouTube viewer, who may move on quickly to shinier clips that catch their interest.
TikTok
The sometimes controversial champion of short-form content, TikTok still feels like the Wild West of video marketing. It isn’t always easy to break through on the video sharing platform, but stuff that goes viral goes really viral.
TikTok users skew younger, though more and more from older demographics are joining the ranks.
TikTok’s infamous algorithm both helps and hurts marketing efforts. It does an uncannily good job of showing users what they want to see, which puts your content in front of right-fit eyeballs. But expanding reach further than the “for you” page can be difficult.
Instagram Reels
Instagram Reels are vertical (9:16) short videos aimed at Instagram’s female-leaning audience. The platform values authenticity and first-person experience (though your reels don’t have to be first-person to succeed).
Short-form is the name of the game here. It’s a great platform for ecommerce marketing, DTC brands, beauty, lifestyle, and just about anything else consumer-oriented.
LinkedIn
Professionals, job-seekers, founders, and corporate types make up the active audience here. If you’re marketing to traditional businesses or professionals, then you need your videos on LinkedIn.
Otherwise, you’ll probably want to move along. It’s typically not the right platform to advertise ecommerce or consumer products or consumption-based services.
If B2B is your niche, you’ll generally want to focus on short-form teaser content that links to longer-form videos hosted off platform. Think webinars, in-depth or interactive videos on professional challenges and solutions, and thought leadership pieces that are designed for lead generation.
Facebook
Usage may be declining by some metrics, and the active user base does skew older, but Facebook still sees regular visits from 70% of U.S. adults. As more and more of Gen Z reaches adulthood, those Zoomers are starting to join the Facebook ranks.
Video is a big part of the platform, though brands and marketers often struggle to find organic growth. Amplification and paid advertising are virtually required to get a branded video into users’ news feeds. While users can post videos of virtually any length, most advertising content is on the shorter side (think TV commercial length, rather than TV episode).
Tips for a successful video marketing strategy
Of course, you’ll also need the right strategy. Use these tips to up your social media game and find consistent success in video marketing.
Focus on fewer platforms—and go deep
Most businesses can go deep or go wide, but not both. We recommend finding the top platform or two for your audience, goals, and content strengths, then going all-in.
Why? Because you won’t get as much return on your effort on every single platform. At some point, the gains are too low to justify the effort and expense.
A fully engaged audience on your best-fit platforms beats a nominally engaged audience every single time. So it’s better to post consistent, optimized, high-quality content on fewer platforms than to spread your brand (and your team) thin across more platforms.
Automated scheduling can also help you do more with less bandwidth. Sked Social gives brands, agencies, and marketers powerful scheduling tools to keep content flowing steadily, even with limited resources or when you’re out of office.
Repurpose content strategically
Every platform has its own requirements, but that doesn’t mean you have to start each post from scratch. Instead, take the “create once, adapt often” approach.
Decide which piece of content is the longest or fullest (maybe a full YouTube tutorial of how to use a product or feature) and start there. Once the main piece is locked down, adapt, chop, and repurpose into Instagram Reels, TikToks, YouTube Shorts—multiple chunks of that original content piece can find new (short-form) lives.
Remember, you’ll need to trim, resize, and reframe videos to fit each platform’s requirements and user expectations. It takes some work, but it’s a lot less work than creating new content for each platform.
You can also use Sked Social to manage your asset libraries and optimize for each channel. Sked gets you started with AI-generated captions in the right format for each channel and can even pull in assets from Canva in the right sizes automatically. Once you’re satisfied with the edits, use Sked to cross-publish videos across your active platforms.
Use data to guide what you do next
Social media algorithms are always changing, and you can say the same about consumers’ habits and preferences. So, as you start seeing more success in your video content, don’t get overly locked into what works today.
Instead, pay attention to performance data, using Sked Social’s analytics to identify what kinds of content and which platforms are doing well for you and where you need to improve.
Look for engagement patterns based on video attributes (like length or topic), and A/B test wherever you can. Compare engagement based on caption styles, platforms, performance over time, video length, and more.
Sked Social’s analytics handle all of this, helping you understand what content and which platforms are driving results so you can keep improving through smarter content decisions.
Choose platforms with purpose, but be prepared to pivot
With video content, the biggest thing to remember is that you don’t need to be everywhere. All that matters is being where your audience engages. Strategic, goal-aligned video production is always more effective than spreading your resources too thin in an attempt to be everywhere at once.
You’ll need to thoughtfully and purposefully choose which video platforms to invest in but also stay flexible enough to pivot when the market demands.
Sked helps you manage social video and stay on top of platform performance by showing you how both your own video content and your competitors’ is doing across platforms. And with auto-scheduling, efficient workflows, and centralized asset libraries, your whole team gets the tools they need to get more eyes on your content.
Ready for a social media management platform that actually simplifies your life? Get started with Sked Social today!
