Many people spend a lot of time, money and effort getting professional videos made for their company or themselves. These videos may be amazing but if you don’t promote them properly then all that time, money and effort could be for nothing!
So as soon as your final video is given to you there are some very simple tricks you need to do straight away in order to gain the full benefits of your video, and the best part of all this is…it’s free! Everything I’m about to tell you is absolutely free for every person on the internet – so without further ado, let’s begin.
YouTube
Firstly, always upload your video straight to YouTube. There are plenty of reasons for doing this but the main reason is because of this simple fact – YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine behind Google.
This means that over a billion people use YouTube as a source of information and/or entertainment and therefore have a great chance of stumbling across your video if you optimise it correctly.
Also in relation to this fact, Google actually own YouTube, therefore they want your videos to be seen, so you can now rank very highly within the Google search engine through your videos! It’s a win/win!
So once the video is uploaded there are many things you now need to do:
Title
Give the video a title which is to-the-point and describes in as few words as possible exactly what it is. Be sure to capatilse the first letters of each word, just for tidiness.
Privacy Setting
This may sound petty but I’ve seen clients do this incorrectly, always set the video to ‘Public’ to ensure everyone has a chance of seeing the video.
Video Description
If your video’s purpose is to promote a service which has a website then put the ‘http://’ link straight away – this means that when it pops up on people’s news feeds they can easily click through to the site without having to click ‘Read More’.
Then ensure to give a good solid description of what your video is about, about 2 paragraphs should be fine.
‘Tags’
These are also known as ‘Meta Data Tags’ which are quite simply keywords which the search engines will use to match your video to what someone types in the search bar. Simples!
Be sure to put as many possible keywords in here as possible, eventually YouTube wont let you add anymore and that’s exactly the right amount to put in.
To write the most effective Meta Data Tags, just try to think “If I were a customer and I wanted to see this video, what would I type in the search bar to find it?” Try to not be too vague here either, if you just use single words you’re very unlikely to be found by those terms. You want to use phrases that you think people may search for…for example if you’ve made a cooking recipe video for chicken pie (I’m a little hungry writing this blog, sorry!) then you’ll want to use tags such as “how to cook chicken pie” and “recipes for chicken pie” etc etc.
Some people don’t think these Meta Data Tags do anything, however from performing a recent test of having 2 similar videos live, one with meta data and one without meta data, we found the meta data version did much better in the rankings after a few months.
Video Thumbnail
As much as we like to believe no one ‘judges a book by its cover’…people on the internet do! Audiences online make snap decisions as to what they’re going to watch based on visual cues, so your video thumbnail/picture needs to represent your video in a nutshell. Again if it’s a video recipe about chicken pie then your picture really should be a nice shot of the chicken pie, not the chef’s face blurred as they pull the pie out the oven etc.
YouTube will give you 3 standard options to choose from and if none of these are suitable then they give you the option to just upload your own one – perfect.
Video Link
So once you’ve completed all of the above your video will be pretty well optimised for people to be able to find it on YouTube. So now with that all done and the video now live, if you ever need to show someone the video or embed it into your website etc my advice would be to always use the YouTube video link.
It means your statistics get higher in terms of video ‘views’ etc and you don’t need to worry about hosting the video on your own site which is a pain.
Only about 1 year ago I used to always tell clients to only ever put their video on YouTube and use that link for everything to get their statistics up. However in the previous year Facebook have really upped their game in the video realm and for the first time ever they had more video views than YouTube! So my advice now is to always upload one version to YouTube and one to Facebook – just to cover all bases!
Timing
This sounds a little ‘OCD’ but ensuring you put your up at the right time is imperative to getting the most people watching your video from the get-go. For example putting a video up at 2pm in the afternoon on a Tuesday is a no-no – the number of people checking their facebook feed at this time is low compared to Saturday morning at 9am. So be sure to think about what time you’re going to put your video up, the best times are mornings/afternoons on weekends when people are generally at home checking their facebook feeds, but during the week generally later at night about 8pm seems to be the best time.
Uploader Profile
The first issue with Facebook is to ensure you don’t upload the video as yourself (unless that’s what you want to do of course!) since 99% of the time you’ll need to ensure to upload it to your Facebook Business Page or Group.
So just be sure to be logged in as your page or group when you upload the video to ensure it’s not going to always have your name attached to it when people start to watch it.
In this video
This is one asset where Facebook is better than YouTube since you can actually tag people in the video and people can tag themselves when its live. This is a great way of the video being seen by more people since when people are tagged in a video it appears on their Facebook profile, so all their connections will see it and so on.
So be sure to tag anyone who you know is in the video but also be sure not to tag anyone who isn’t in the video since Facebook will see it as spam and remove the video.
Title
Exactly the same as with the YouTube version, ensure to write a short and concise title which describes the video in a nutshell.
Thumbnail
Same again, ensure the picture defines the video – Facebook gives you the option of 11 preset photos for the video and to option to add a custom.
Where and When
Another great feature of using Facebook for videos is you can specify the exact location your video was filmed and when. The ‘where’ is great since (for example) if you filmed an event at a large venue then this will tag the venue in the video, possibly enticing them to promote and share the video as well! The year isn’t too important, you may in fact not want to ‘date’ the video and so can just leave this blank.
Call to Action
This is one of the best and simplest features for Facebook videos! At the end of your video it will display a button of your choice (there’s lots of options from ‘sign up’ to ‘Download) and is a great way of getting people to click the button to visit your website or ‘sign up’ to your service etc so definitely make use of this.
Facebook Advertising
There are a few people that moan about Facebook advertisements but I personally find they work really well – especially for video. So I’d always suggest putting a little bit of budget behind a video for a facebook advert, just to get the most out of it. As a rule of thumb I’d say a minimum budget of £10 is required and then schedule that advert for one or two full days on a Saturday/Sunday to get the best effect. Be specific with your target audience and then watch the ‘views’ and click-throughs to your ‘call to action’ fly in!
And that’s it in a nutshell really! There are countless more things you can do with your videos however if you’re new to this then just follow all the above steps and you’ll have definitely optimised and got the most out of your video simply through YouTube and Facebook.
The key thing to remember is the purpose of each of those platforms. YouTube is more for you to reach people online who may be searching for the video you’ve posted – and of course to give you an easy link to embed your video and show it to people. Facebook is much more about the social element, tagging people and getting people to share and like etc etc. So if you bear this in mind when sorting your videos you’ll be completely fine 🙂
