How to ensure your video gets seen
Web distribution
Not sure where or how to market your web video? Marketing a video is important to get right because getting it wrong can either mean that no one sees it and you have therefore wasted your time and money producing it; or lots of people are watching it but they are the wrong audience. So how do you make sure you get the marketing right?
1. Upload your video everywhere
It’s really important that you upload your video to YouTube (considering that over 4 billion YouTube videos are viewed a day!) but it is equally important to also upload to as many other video sharing sites as you can find (Vimeo, Daily Motion, Blip.tv etc.) and don’t forget your existing social networks such as Facebook. That said though, do research each site you upload your video to in order to ensure that the site and its community fit your audience profile.
2. Make sure people are sharing your video
The only people that you will be able to immediately share your video with are people who are already aware of you or your brand. You will need these people to share your video with their contacts for you video to have any potential of going viral and making a big impact.
3. Find and understand your sharers
End viewers are those who will watch the video but not share it. While they are of value, those who are going to watch your video and share it are the viewers you really want. Do what you can to find who it is that is sharing your videos and establish why and how they are sharing them.
4. Make your video shareable
People will not be able to share your videos (as you need them to do) if you are not allowing them to. It may seem risky to allow comments, embedding, downloads etc but unless you do so, people will not be able to share your video.
5. Carefully select your video title
Not only is the title important with regards to people finding your video online, but people will often make their ultimate judgement about whether to start watching your video or not based on its title. Even if your video is the funniest, most romantic, most informative and most inspirational video ever created, if the title is dull, then the wonders of your video will be hidden from the world forever!
6. What is special about your video
If you think your video has the potential to go viral, you must think there is something special about it. As mentioned, sharing has to happen for your video to go viral but people will not share something if there is nothing special about it. It may be that your video is funny, inspiring, surprising or it may be that the product you are presenting is simply fascinating. Whatever it is, make sure you identify your videos ‘special feature’ and tell people about it as you distribute it.
7. Link to and from other social networks
For your video to spread, it will be necessary for it to have a presence across numerous social networks and not just the video networks. Regularly post tweets and facebook messages pointing to your video and subtly encourage others to do likewise.
8. Seek subscriptions
When it comes to YouTube, many users do not realise the power there is in other users subscribing to their channel. If people are subscribing to your YouTube channel, your videos will get more views. So do all you can to call people to subscribe to your YouTube channel.
9. Use YouTube annotations
When posting your video to YouTube, use their annotations feature to encourage people to share your video and subscribe to your channel.
10. Track your video
Once your video is out there, identify where/why/how the video has been successful. YouTube have their own analytics that will identify large referrers and show you which keyword searches are driving people to your video and most other main video platforms will have something similar.
Feel free to contact us for further advice if you are still unsure about the appropriate distribution of your video or if you would like some assistance in distributing your video. We offer everything from more traditional DVD design, authoring and duplication through to the creation of video files for use on social networking sites. We produce High Definition files for use online, on mobile devices and tablets. We can also embed video content into bespoke video players for your website, or in PDF documents and PowerPoint presentations.