Sharing your videos online – where to post them? [2015 Edition]
This article has been updated!
Take a look at the newer edition of this article for more recent information about this topic. See newer version.This post is a follow up to our post, Hosting your videos online – where do you put them?! If you’ve not had a chance read it yet, we suggest you take a look before pressing on!
Following on from our last blog post, we’re now going to take a look at how to go about sharing your videos online to get the most views.
The options
Website or Blog
When you’re trying to promote a video, it’s essential to share it on your website or blog. This way you have a custom-branded webpage where people can be sent to view your video. If you’re trying to get lots of hits to climb up the Youtube search ranking, we suggest embedding your video from Youtube directly. Otherwise we suggest using a professional platform such as Vimeo or Wistia.
While it’s typically very difficult to put a video directly into an email, there are ways that you can fake it for good results. The simplest thing to do is to take a screenshot of your video, superimpose a play button onto it and embed this image into your email. You can set the image to link to your website where you can embed the video itself. This keeps your subscribers’ inboxes happy and gets your video out there. More information.
Adding video to Facebook is incredibly easy. If you have video hosted elsewhere on the web you can share a link on your timeline or your page. Videos hosted on Youtube and Vimeo will usually play back within the timeline on desktop, or will simply take the viewer to the page it’s hosted on. However, Facebook accepts video uploads. For better results we suggest uploading your videos directly to Facebook as you’ll benefit from autoplaying videos, better support on mobile and a higher profile on the news feed.
Additionally, you can also pay Facebook to promote your video through their ad platform, exposing it to a whole wealth of eyeballs that wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. We’ve had good results promoting our posts with only £15 worth of Facebook advertising.
Sharing a video on Twitter is just like sharing any other link. For Youtube and Vimeo links, Twitter will create a video card that will let users watch your video inline, or transfer them to the page where your video is hosted. If your video is less than thirty seconds you can upload it directly to their site from an iOS device, although support for longer videos is reportedly coming soon and presumably can be uploaded from any device.
LinkedIn makes it easy to share your videos on their service. Although you can’t upload video directly to the site, you can easily share a Youtube link on your timeline or a link to a webpage with a video embedded. Additionally, you can also add a Youtube link to your profile using the ‘Add Media’ button.
Instagram, Vine & Snapchat
These fringe social networks can be used for sharing video, although are more suitable for content created specifically for these sites. All of these platforms have length limitations. Instagram will only upload 15 seconds of video, Snapchat will record for 10 seconds and Vine will upload 6 seconds. These mobile-only services may be useful for your self-produced content as they all (except Snapchat) allow for easy sharing on social media sites. However, it’s important to bear in mind that these services tend to have a much younger demographic – if you’re trying to sell products to an older generation you may want to consider whether they’re worth the additional effort!
Conclusion
As you can see, there are quite a number of outlets available for sharing your video. The most important thing is understanding which demographics tend to use which services. As mentioned above, the mobile-specific platforms are mostly used by young people. LinkedIn is strictly business so you wouldn’t necessarily want to post your non-business videos on there, and although most Twitter users are oblivious to it, Twitter still tends to be occupied with a tech savvier demographic. While each platform has its own quirks, getting the technical basics right when it comes to sharing your videos online will hopefully make all of the difference when it comes to trying to attract attention there.
For more information, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’re happy to talk with any business that is looking at using video to enhance their marketing efforts.
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