Alan DraperSo you’ve made an explainer video. Congrats! You’ve even put it on your homepage. You’ve taken a huge first step in changing how customers find you and how your sales and marketing teams reach new clients.
The only question now is, “How are you going to promote your video on social media?”
Social Media Video Marketing
Make no mistake—creating a great video is only the first step in your new video marketing strategy. And FYI, the second step isn’t “Tweet video link then take a nap.” Getting a return on your investment with a quality video is all about a consistent, targeted video marketing plan built on tracking and metrics to learn which platforms work, and where your customers are coming from.
Ideally you want every step in this video marketing process to lead back to your homepage—that’s where your sales team can turn leads and into buyers. Luckily, social media is a cheap, easy to use, and absolutely perfect tool for funneling thousands of fresh eyes to your site.
But there’s a right way and a wrong way to promote your video on social media. So before you randomly plaster your video on Google+ and LinkedIn forums, here are 3 simple ways to promote your new video on social media. For free.
Pin Your Video to Social Media Accounts. All of Them.
The first step in promoting your video is putting it where people can see it. Luckily, the internet is full of places for your new video to shine.
Almost every social media account lets you “pin” a favorite post in a static, highly visible place at the top of your profile. Pin your video to all of your social media accounts.
Twitter lets you pin your top tweet so visitors and new followers see it right away. Facebook business pages allow you to set a featured post at the top of your page. A featured video ensures that you’ll put your best foot forward no matter what your latest tweet is or what time-sensitive campaign you’re running. The best part; the link always directs leads straight to the video embedded on your website—not on social media.
Pinning a video, or a link to a video gives it evergreen value, not to mention that “pinned tweets lead to a tenfold conversion rate bump.” You’ve already paid to make a great animated explainer video for your business, so leverage the heck out of it on every brand page and account. Also, a dedicated “pinned” video link gives your brand redundancy and identity.
People need multiple contact with branded content before they begin the purchasing process. Your consistent use of video reminds users about your product every time they engage with you online.
Best Practices: Pin your video using a customized link from bit.ly or tiny url. These social media optimized links are short, and can even include the keyword you’re targeting as part of the link. Better yet, each unique link can track clicks and interaction over time, and you don’t have to use clunky, hard to share links full of alphanumeric characters.
You can customize short links to drive traffic to a specific video, like this title sequence opener we did for the HBO show Weeds:
http://bit.ly/WeedsShowOpener (see how the url has the keywords you want?)
Share A Screenshot on Social Media
You don’t even need to actually play your video to promote it on social media. Just show people the thumbnail.
A great way to stretch the shelf life of an animated explainer video is to carve it into sections via social media posts that only target one element of the video. Isolate several short clips or sections and treat them as stand alone videos on Twitter and Facebook. Take a screenshot of the relevant step or section, add text via a free graphics program like Canva, and viola, you have fresh relevant content that points back to your primary resource—your video embedded on your homepage.
The tweet, Instagram, or Facebook post will drive engagement via a snazzy image. And more views on your video means higher search engine ranking down the road (but more on that in a minute). Here’s a final strategy, and it’s great for targeting that most inscrutable of social media users—millennials.
Create a Gif
Kids these days like video content, but they might like shorter video content even more. Take the strategy of breaking your content up even further by creating a short GIF—3-6 seconds—that highlights a particularly visual moment in one of your videos.
Giphy features a simple tool that allows you to copy YouTube links in and create a custom gif in seconds.
The gif can drive engagement on posts that link back to your video, as well as providing a bit of fun brand identity. It’s a way to leverage every ounce of marketing juice your video contains, but while the temptation to meme your GIF is strong, avoid diluting your brand with too much of this type of content. Remember, quality is the key to strong social media engagement.
Social Media Video Marketing SEO: The Boring Behind the Scenes Stuff
While Google SEO best practices change all the time (ask a copywriter about h1 keyword tags!) you can be sure of one thing—Google’s algorithms love video.
Actually, that’s misleading. People like videos, particularly high quality videos that serve a specific purpose or solve a specific problem, so people are more likely to click on search results that feature a video. Heck, they’re more and more likely to only search for content with video. And Google wants to give people what they want. So, in a roundabout way, Google loves video. So use your video liberally.
“If you’re consistently publishing good content, steadily acquiring backlinks, and adding rich media including images and video, you’re taking all the right steps to maintain a solid ranking,” says the Sherice Jacobs at Kissmetrics. SEO practices change every single year, but keep in mind that the whole point of search engine optimization is to deliver results that real people find useful. Video is exactly that.
Embed easy to share video content using links that you can track for a clear picture of what content is working, and where it’s working. The best part of a well executed social media video marketing campaign is the exponential feedback loop of higher search rankings.
Social media links lead to clicks, views, and shares, which leads to increased site traffic, which leads to higher search engine ranking, which leads to more traffic, better quality backlinks and social shares, which leads to higher ranking, more traffic, more links, more shares, higher traffic…
Quality video is the cornerstone of a successful social media marketing campaign. Position your video in the spotlight with these three simple tips and techniques and reap the benefits of your explainer video for years to come.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alan Draper.
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