In our last post in this Video SEO series, we took a look at Building a Community on YouTube. Now it's time to take a closer look at How and Why to Share YouTube Videos to Other Social Media.
One of the quickest ways to get attention for your video content, is by sharing with your other social media audiences you have already built. The first decision you have to make is which location you want to share. In our opinion it is best to always share the main embed page on your corporate site where you have implemented the schema, site-map, and transcriptions. The other alternative would be to share the YouTube page itself. This strategy would be effective for anyone who has a well planned out and exhaustive YouTube channel with many videos, links, etc. if not, stick to sharing your main site content.
A few best practices when sharing to each social media platform:
Sharing a video to Facebook can be done very quickly and effectively:
For sharing from your main site content, just copy the URL and past that into your Facebook status update. Facebook will automatically pull in a featured image from your onsite content and use that as the thumbnail. After adding a brief description, you can delete the original link. This will keep the post cleaner but still keep the link to the page. Remember to ask effective questions, and avoid using a URL shortening service for linking video, these services give credit and social link value to their sites, not yours.
If you wish to share directly from YouTube: simply select “share” in YouTube and copy the link, or click the Facebook icon. Paste the link into your Facebook timeline and your custom thumbnail should automatically be the image in the Facebook timeline. Be sure to add a reason to click on the video in the description. Asking a question is a great way to engage audiences and increase click through rate. Questions such as: “what do you think?”, or; “which would you choose and why?”. These questions engage audiences, increase click through rates, views, engagement and video value.
Vine is a great tool for building “teasers”. Have your video crew shoot a “behind the scenes” series of videos to build buzz before product launches, or to build an audience and give your brand a human side.
Instagram allows short 8-second videos to be posted to your Instagram audiences. These could be video teasers (shortened versions of your full YouTube video) or even a single screen shot from your video. You could post the single frame YouTube thumbnail image to Instagram. A word of warning however is that Instagram audiences do not react well to commercial efforts. Rather reserve this medium for building relationships between individual clients and staff through images being shared unless you must.
To really ignite the value of your video online try having key influencers in your niche share your videos on their channel, or social media platform of choice. If they are on YouTube ask them if they will feature your video on their timeline. If they are on Facebook ask them to share your post with their followers. On Twitter? Ask them to retweet your posts.
The key to this strategy is to not ask these individuals for a favor out of the blue. It is very important that you first build a relationship with these individuals. That doesn’t mean you have to email back and forth for months before asking, but a series of small but simple gestures: Like a post or two. Ask them a question, get their advice. Make sure they recognize your name when you ask them to share your content.
Be picky about what you ask them to post. Don’t email them every week. Don’t ask them to share every video you post. Don’t take advantage of a relationship you build.
How do you find a key influencers’ email address? Use this tool to find an email address for just about anyone: linksy.me/find-email (Please only use this super power for good... Read: "Please don't spam me...")
In our FINAL post in this series we'll talk more about using video for Link Building with the help of video citation sources.
