A few weeks ago, we were in California for our client’s event: ClickZ Live in San Francisco.
One of the best presentations I attended was a video Marketing 101 tips talk given by Greg Jarboe, President & Co-founder of SEO-PR.
In his session, Unlocking the secrets to mobile video marketing: from YouTube to Instagram, to Vine, Greg shared several tips and tricks for getting the most out of video on these popular social media platforms.
So how do you create a piece of video that is likely to succeed?
Here are some “keywords” Greg suggested you remember as you produce your videos:
Exhilaration
Greg considers this as the most important key to a successful video. “It doesn’t matter if your video features a cat or a baby, the point is to leave your audience with a feeling of exhilaration.” A great example of this would be the video campaign series created by GoPro Cameras.
The campaign started with hiring extreme athletes to show what they can do with GoPro cameras. It went so well that people started to shoot their own videos in hope of becoming the GoPro’s next star. Now GoPro has more than 2 million subscriptions on YouTube, and about 6,000 videos are posted on YouTube with the word GoPro in their titles or descriptions every single day.
Hilarity
People like to share funny stuff with their friends, and that’s why so many funny videos go viral. Greg mentioned the Purina Friskies’ commercial to demonstrate how powerful a video with “hilarity” can be. Partnering with BuzzFeed, the cat food brand told a story about an adult cat writing a letter to a younger kitten who had moved in with him.
Sharability
“You should always think about what kind of video you would like to share as an audience,” Greg said during his talk. Besides funny videos, another type of video that people love to share on social media is “How to” videos.
As a home improvement retailer, instructional videos are perfect for Lowe’s to grow their brand awareness. The “Fix in Six” video series on Vine has been a huge success. About a week from launch, the campaign had already generated 28,000 mentions across social media.
In addition to the above “keywords”, Greg introduced the characteristics of the three popular video platforms.
With more than 1 billion unique users each month, YouTube has become the second largest search engine in the world. Moreover, 500 years of YouTube videos are watched on Facebook per day and 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter per minute. Compared with YouTube, Instagram and Vine have smaller audience sizes but still have millions of active users per month.
However, “Not everyone on that platform is going to watch your video.” Greg suggested that instead of blindly choose the platform with the biggest audience base, marketers should focus more on the compatibility of the platform with the message you want to send.
Marketers also need to use different search strategies to boost their video according to different platforms. For instance, YouTube looks at relevance, upload date, watch time, and rating to rank your video, while Instagram and Vine have only hashtags for discoverability instead of more complicated algorithms.
Closing his session, Greg shared the result of Animoto online and mobile video study which shows that 96% of consumers find videos helpful when making purchase decisions online and 77% of them consider companies that create online video as more engaged with their customer base.
Thanks to Greg for his informative and engaging presentation!
And thank you for reading,
Bianca Hu – Delightful’s Digital Marketing Specialist