Sharing YouTube Videos to Social Media

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.

Strategy Overview

• Sharing videos to social media garners them immediate attention, backlinks, and potential for having key influencers like or share the video content.

Why It Works

• Social media are a series of communities that may share a passion for your content, or already be searching for it. In addition, you can leverage the value of an audience you have already built.

How To Do It

• Have a strategy for each social media platform before you create your video.

Effect

• Immediate traffic. Real world feedback. Views. Conversations. Conversions.

Strategy Details

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 Video To Facebook

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.

Sharing Video To Twitter

• As with sharing video by Facebook:
• Avoid using URL shortening services as these make tracking difficult and will not credit your site with the link.
• Link to your main embed page if possible. Use the full URL.
• Ask your audience to retweet: “Pls RT”.
• Add a description. Questions work best (see Facebook suggestions for more)
• The same links you use for Facebook will be sufficient for Twitter.

Sharing To Google +

• Google + is often overlooked as a prime social media for sharing, but including this in your video publication routine has several benefits:
• Easier to reach out to key influencers than both Facebook and Twitter.
• A followed link from a Google web property.
• +’s show up in Search and Paid advertising
• Having key influencers +1 your posts means it is more likely to show up in their followers SERP’s for related searches.
• Building an audience on Google + is easier, and seemingly lower commitment than other social platforms, making it easier to build a large audience to share content with quickly.

Sharing Video To Vine

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.

Sharing Video To Instagram

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.

Share Videos With Key Influencers

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.