Getting People to Watch Your Video
Videos are one of the best ways to communicate. After spending the time and money to create a video, make sure you follow through with distribution to make your investment worthwhile.
Make it Worth Sharing
First and foremost entertain your audience. If the content is not there and you did not connect with your audience, you are wasting everyone’s time. Each email, post, tweet, or video is a chance for you to brand yourself. Better to not do anything than brand yourself as anything other then excellence.
Asks Others to Share it
Be carful not to be overly pushy, but encourage others to like and share the content they enjoy. People are more likely to read or watch something from a friend then a total stranger.
Use Social Media
You need to build a brand and following around what ever it is you’d like to share with the world. There is a misconception that just posting a video on YouTube will get thousands of hits. This is an extremely rare phenomenon. You need to have a core following through different services. Whether its Twitter, Facebook, a Youtube Channel, e-mail list, blog or website, already having a following familiar with you gives a great starting point. These people will see all your content automatically. Study the analytics on these sites to get feedback on how well your content is received.
Appealing Thumbnail
Both Vimeo and Youtube allow custom thumbnails, so don’t just use the default. Use the opportunity to preview whatever it is the need to see. Upload a custom title graphic or an eye-catching frame from the video. (YouTube Instructions)
Great title
Draw people in with an descriptive title that makes them feel as if they need to watch it. The book "Advertising Advertising Headlines that Make You Rich" can help you do just that. Include key words that your target audience may be searching for.
Use the right tags (and #tags)
Youtube is actually the 2nd largest search engine in the world. For many people Youtube is their number one source for knowledge, entertainment, and news. Take advantage of this by entering key words relating to the video in the tags section on Youtube or Vimeo. This will help with your videos search ability and show it next to related videos.The first few sentences in the description are also used to categorize your video in the search engines.
When posting to Facebook or Twitter take advantage of hashtags and links. Type in “@example” to tag other people and pages involved or the location of the video. This then shows the video to their audience as well. For hashtags type in “#example” to show your post along with others of the same hashtag. (More info on hashtags)
Payed promotion
Youtube and Facebook allow users to pay for more exposer to your content. Youtube promotion will feature your video next to others of similar content.
Facebook promotion will add your posts to the new feeds of those row are not your friends/followers. Use Facebook's Power Editor to target a specific demographic. This will make sure the right people are seeing your post.
What other resources have you've found helpful in getting your work out there?
