A Guide To Producing Video Marketing For Social Media
Using social media, video marketing and viral marketing videos to increase your brands visibility and customer engagement is a vital part of any marketing activity. It engages the customer in friendly territory and creates a powerful bond if done correctly.
If you have, or are planning on producing a promotional video or video marketing content then social media is a persuasive and engaging platform for you to connect with new customers.
However many companies and organisations still drop the ball in this area and make small mistakes that render such activity much less effective. Here some tips on how to easily maximise the use of social media for your video marketing. Firstly we’re assuming that you have (or are going to have) some video marketing assets that you want to get front and centre on the social media spectrum.
Drip Feed the Excitement
But before we get into what to do with your video lets step back a little and look at how you can even use social media while your video is being made. If you’re on the actual film shoot with your in-house guys or an external production company then make sure you take a few photos of the shoot and tweet them to generate excitement. If you take a few then don’t use them all at once. Instead drip feed them as single image tweets on social media (twitter) to generate a slow build of expectation. Use hash tags like #behindthescenes #onset etc to help users find and share your photos.
Upload & Tag
Once your promotional video is complete then there are several strands to your social media plan.
Firstly upload the video to YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook. Tag it respectively using tags that aren’t too long and are separated with commas.
Then (and this is important) make sure you include your url in the films description. This creates a back-link to your site and helps to generate traffic in the direction you are aiming for.
You can also overlay live clickable links back to your site using youtube but you’ll need to register the content with them first so that they can verify the video is yours.
Embed
You should also embed the video straight into your own website. This means that the video sits on either youtube or vimeo but can be played directly through your site. The main benefit being that you don’t need to host the film on your own server and because you are harnessing the power of the youtube and its built in video player. Critically, this ensures that your film can easily be viewed on any computer or device available without any new video payer software being required.
Youtube is obviously the most popular video site out there but you should not overlook Vimeo for embedding the film into your own webiste. Vimeo gives you great insight into how many times people have viewed the embedded film on your site and where they are located in the world allowing you a clear way of measuring the impact of your film.
Tell the World
So now you’ve got copies of your film on Youtube, Facebook, Vimeo and your own website. It’s now time to tell the world about it!
A key mistake that businesses make is to only tweet a link or announcement about their new promotional video once. Many Twitter users may miss your original link if they follow numerous tweeters and so repeat tweeting is essential. Using a scheduler such as Social Sprout helps a great deal here. It’s really easy to use and allows you to load up tweets with links then schedule them to repeat on any given day. You can load up an entire months worth of social media activity and simply let the site do the hard work of spreading the word. It also allows you to send the same message to facebook, linked in and google + so it saves lots of time.
Don’t Be Shy
Other social media sites that can be great for maximising your video marketing exposure are Google+ (you’ll be surprise how many people now use it!). Pinterest and of course Linkedin. Don’t be afraid of over saturation as many social media users dip in and out of each platform so the chances of them seeing your message repeated too many times are slim.
Behind the Scenes
Now remember those photos you took on shoot that you tweeted individually? Now is the time to make further use of these by creating a “behind the scenes” gallery (something that people generally love to see). You can upload all the shots to a gallery in facebook, on your own site, or pinterest and include backlinks to the embedded video on your own site. This helps further boost interest once the intial launch has passed.
One thing that I really want to stress is that none of this is either complex or time consuming. All of the actions described above require little technical knowledge and go a long way to making your Viral Marketing Videos work at their maximum potential, giving it every chance of engaging new customers with your brand.
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