Have you incorporated video into your marketing strategy? If not, it’s time you should. A few years ago, video marketing seemed to be its own entity. If you wanted to be found by select audiences, you had to have video. But now, video has special significance everywhere. In this post, we will look at why you need to start video marketing now.
YouTube: The world’s second largest search engine.
Google is, and likely will always be number one. But YouTube has over a billion users who watch millions upon millions of hours of video. You can reach them by creating video that they can discover in YouTube search or general Google search results, depending on your video’s topic and how well you optimize it for search engines.
Alternatively, you can reach YouTube‘s audience via a wide range ofYouTube video advertising options. This includes banners, commercials before another video, commercials in the middle of a longer video, sponsored videos in the sidebar, and many other ad typesspecifically made to appeal to video consumers.
YouTube creators go beyond entertainment value. They serve audiences with actionable “how-to” content from helping golfers fix a slice to buying a used car and online marketing tutorials for beginners. YouTube has become a free educational hub for “learn it yourself” consumers and makers.
Best of all, every video you create for YouTube can be repurposed for dozens of other video hosting sites like Vimeo, DailyMotion, and many others. In addition, social networks like LinkedIn allow you to link YouTube videos to company pages and use them as media samples for your professional profiles, giving you even more opportunities to share videos about your business.
Video gets great reach on Facebook.
Do you want to reach more people on Facebook? Start using video. Video has been shown to get more organic reach than other types of posts according to studies by SocialBakers. Facebook is also starting to rival YouTube in video views, claiming to have hit an average of eight billion daily video views.
And now, if you want to get people engaged with your business, you should consider incorporating live video. Facebook has recently found that people spend three times longer with live video than with pre-recorded video. This is likely due to the fact that viewers can actually engage with the person(s) on camera by sending reactions, asking questions, etc.
But even if you don’t want to get into live video just yet (which is now available for personal profiles, pages, and groups), you definitely need to start uploading video to your Facebook page for that organic reach boost. Not to mention you can pick one video as a featured video that appears above the About box on the left sidebar of your page. Think of it like a commercial or introduction for new visitors to your Facebook page.
Soon, Twitter’s 140 won’t include media attachments.
Do you want to share more on Twitter? If so, then start sharing video. Twitter plans to roll out a new change that allows people to add media to their tweets without counting it towards their 140 characters. This means you can link to a video and still have 140 characters to describe it to your followers and add hashtags.
This is beneficial for multiple reasons. For starters, the video will stand out in the news feed, and the play button on the video will beg for people to click it.
Secondly, the video will get added to your media library, which appears on the left sidebar of your Twitter profile. That way, unlike your normal tweets that get lost in your profile’s timeline, visitors to your profile will see your latest six media shares. So be sure to make your video thumbnails will catch people’s eye and make them want to click!
Live group video chat is getting hotter and hotter.
Google Hangouts helped the explosion of live video group chat and public broadcasting of roundtables and live group Q&A. Then cameBlab.im, which brought a little more simplicity for those who wanted to have four people on at a time and rotate people in and out of the broadcast easily. And now there’s Huzza, a new Blab-like live group broadcasting platform with even more features that you can use, for a price.
The point is, if you want to get some exposure on a personal level that you can use to get your business exposure, you should consider getting invited onto or hosting a live show on one of these newer platforms. While Google Hangouts is older, it has the advantage of being free, having the ability to host up to ten people, and having lots of features such as screen sharing. While other platforms are newer, don’t count out Google Hangouts just yet.
Your business ought to be in pictures.
As you can see, there are lots of ways your business can enter the world of video. The key is to find the way that is best for your business and start there. And to make sure that no matter what type of video you create that you share it on as many platforms as possible so that you reach as many people as possible with your video marketing.
This article first appeared in www.entrepreneur.com
