Social Media Strategy

You may have various goals for using videos on YouTube. You may want to spread awareness for your products or your enterprise. You may want to counter others who have a different perspective than you on an issue. But one of the most important objectives you may have is to gain prospects, supporters, and evangelists for your organization.

For these and other reasons you’ll want to be sure to include a strong call to action in your videos. The results can be amazing.

Here’s an example of the power of video to create action. Lynn Rogers, with the Wildlife Research Institute, and the North American Bear Center near Ely, Minnesota, gained an international reputation over 40 years of working in the field with black bears. But Rogers gained international fame by the simple act of broadcasting live on the Web the birth of a black bear named Hope in January, 2010.

The “den cam” video was in black and white and a bit murky, and a mere 25,000 viewers watched it live.[1] Within a couple of days, after becoming the #1 Yahoo.com featured story, the birth video was the #1 most-viewed YouTube video on January 24, 2010 and by late 2010 it garnered more than 800,000 views. The subsequent story of Hope and her mother, Lily, included Hope getting lost for a few days in May, 2010, and again in June.[2] The bear drama spawned almost 300 videos on YouTube, covering the two bears as if they were the latest Hollywood “it” girls.

But all this interest didn’t just happen all by itself. The creators of the “den cam,” PixController Wildlife Webcam, used social media to help the phenomenon along. According to company CEO Bill Powers, “The day it (the video feed) went up … it just went berserk at that point. It was the first time anybody had actually seen a bear den. When the bear cub was born, it was kind of neat. That’s when we started to use a lot of the social tools like Facebook and those kind of things to get the word out quick, and it just went viral at that point.”[3]

The social media efforts included a “Lily the Black Bear” Facebook page[4] with more than 115,000 fans, whose comments on Facebook generated more than 6,000 links.

Hundreds of thousands of viewers were fascinated by the experience, and their interest turned into donations totaling $400,000 to the non-profit organizations Rogers heads, Wildlife Research Institute, and the North American Bear Center.[5] In addition, the bear center received a $100,000 grant from Chase Community Giving on Facebook, a program sponsored by JPMorgan Chase in which Facebook users vote on how the charity distributes $5 million. The center received almost 18,000 votes among more than 2.5 million Facebook users who participated.

Demonstrating our recommendation that an organization’s main Website must be modified to support social media efforts, Rogers’ Website, bear.org, posts blow-by-blow accounts of Lily and Hope, and features a prominent donation button with a funds thermometer.[6] The main page of the Website features various live Webcam feeds, a recent donor honor roll, and the opportunity to buy bear paraphernalia.

What can you learn from the Lily and Hope phenomenon? It’s clear that an engaging story supported by video and combined with other social media efforts can deliver for your organization in a big way. Think of the human (or non-human) stories your organization can tell, and how video can help you tell them. It doesn’t matter if you have slick production values — look at what was achieved with a low-resolution black and white video. What counts is telling the story, and connecting with your viewers.

For more video tips, Teach to Fish Digital has a free YouTube tutorial.[7]

Optimize Your YouTube Videos

Like everything else on the Web, your videos are no good if nobody can find them. In addition to maximizing the effect of your social presence on YouTube, as we discussed in the last section, you need to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your YouTube channel. The following recommendations are for YouTube and Google. Optimizing for other search engines will likely be slightly different.

You Tube’s search algorithm considers the following attributes of videos when determining ranking, whether they are embedded on your site or on YouTube:

• Title — If you’ve embedded your YouTube video in a page on your site, make sure the title of the page matches the title of the video. You’ll do better in search rankings if it does.
• Description — Optimize the first 27 characters, which is what displays before truncation in listings. Include a shortened clickable URL (see the Shrinking Long URLs post for more information). The video’s description is shown in the search results on Google.
• Tags — Include relevant keywords that describe the video. Make these keywords consistent with those you use in the title and description fields. YouTube has a keyword tool[1] you can use to get suggested keywords. There’s even a beta capability to get keywords by demographic group.
• Number of Views — You want to focus on getting more views, naturally, so share your videos appropriately using YouTube’s social media tools and commenting as well as other social networks. You also want to show up in the list of related videos that appear over a video that’s finished playing, and to the right of the video Try to get your videos into this area. People tend to watch videos in batches. The average YouTube viewer views more than 100 videos per month.[2] Try to keep your most important videos in the Recent Activity listing[3] on your channel by periodically tweaking the annotation (a text field that pops up over the video) or other text fields of the video. Videos in Recent Activity perform the best on searches.The Recent Activity box has a lot of other functionality. Adding new favorites to your channel shows up in the box, as well as new ratings and comments on others’ videos. You can broadcast bulletins directly to your channel subscribers, and these show up in your Recent Activity box as well. When you post a bulletin, it will also appear on your subscribers’ Recent Activity boxes.
• Rating — The rating[4] of your video is similar to the Motion Picture Association of America’s movie content ratings. You can rate your video on five categories: Language, Nudity, Sexual Situations, Violence and Drug Use.
• View counts — You can only influence this indirectly, obviously.
• Playlist Additions — Viewers can add your video to their video playlists. You might consider asking users to add the video to their playlists in your video description or the video itself, since many viewers may not be familiar with this feature.
• Thumbs Up/Down — Viewers can rate your video by indicating thumbs up or thumbs down. This type of rating, representing how much viewers like the video, is different from the content ratings mentioned earlier in this list. Consider encouraging thumbs up ratings in your video description or the video.

 Figure 1 — Thumbs Up Ratings on YouTube

• Shares/Embeds — YouTube viewers can share videos they find interesting with their friends. They also can embed your video in their own sites. This social networking capability can be a key to your video’s success, so don’t be afraid to encourage those who comment positively on the video to share it with their networks. There is a bit of controversy among experts over whether third party embeds are more important than those on your own Website.
• Favorites — Viewers can add your video to their list of favorites, which can be seen by visitors to their channels. Encourage this behavior as well.
• Comments — It is unclear at this time whether YouTube is evaluating comments for what is known as sentiment — whether the comment is negative or positive. You obviously want positive comments. Your strategy should specify how you will respond to negative comments.
• Complete Views — YouTube apparently weights whether the viewer watched your video to completion and factors that into its search algorithm. There’s little you can do about this, of course, except create compelling videos.
• Channel Views — Another variable you can’t really control, channel views is the number of visitors who have viewed your channel page. It is not a summary of all video views, since videos can be viewed via search results and embeds.
• Authority of Your Channel — Authority is a complicated concept similar to Google’s Page Rank. It basically is an assessment of your channel’s influence. A good way to increase your authority score is to leave comments on channels that have a high authority score.
• Annotations — Text in the annotations on your video can also influence search results.
• Flagging — If your video gets flagged by users for offensiveness, that will negatively affect your search ranking.
• OneBox Results — Google often includes a “OneBox” at the bottom of the first page of its results containing a selection of similar sites. If your video appears in OneBoxes, that’s likely to increase its search ranking.

Figure 2 — YouTube Video in Google OneBox

• Number of Subscribers — Not surprisingly, the more subscribers you have to a video, the higher it will rank.

YouTube gives some guidance regarding search results in its GoogleWebmasterHelp channel.[5]

As noted in the previous list, one way that YouTube (and, Google, which owns YouTube) finds videos is by looking for keywords in the title, description, and tags fields. So you definitely want to determine the important keywords and ensure that you enter them in those fields.

However, make sure that the keywords are appropriate to the subject of the video, and that you don’t jam lots of unrelated keywords into the tags field. The reason: YouTube/Google will penalize videos for using a technique called keyword stuffing — placing lots of irrelevant tags in an item in an attempt to get more traffic. If they determine that you are keyword stuffing, both search engines will penalize your video. So make sure you use consistent keywords in the title, description, and tags fields and that they are appropriate for the actual video they describe.

While you should definitely pay attention to these techniques we’ve just listed, keep in mind that using the social networking aspects of YouTube will probably be even more powerful in not only getting you more viewers, but more-appropriate viewers. To develop a robust YouTube community for your business, follow our general community-building recommendations elsewhere in this book.

[1] YouTube keyword tool: bit.ly/aFQNft

[2] comScore press release comScore Releases May 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings: bit.ly/9Y9D3m

[3] YouTube Getting Started: Recent Activity privacy settings: bit.ly/9qdBLs

[4] YouTube Learn More: YouTube Content Ratings: bit.ly/c16tqH

[5] GoogleWebmasterHelp: What factors influence video results in Universal Search?: bit.ly/91Fb15

Your first step in publicizing your YouTube channel should be to post comments on related YouTube videos. You may attract some followers this way. But be careful. It’s probably not cool to post snarky comments on competitors’ videos. Consider including URLs in comments on related videos and even creating video responses. And don’t disable commenting on your channel. See the post on Dealing with Negatives for reasons why you don’t want to limit dissent.

Next, embed your YouTube videos on your Website and on your blogs. This makes them do double duty, and will attract viewers to your channel. There’s a bit more on embedding below.

Take a look at your competition and see how they are tagging their videos. Tag your videos the same way. This way, when their video is over, and YouTube displays other videos to view next, your video is likely to come up, as in the following figure

Figure 1 — Suggested Videos Areas on YouTube Page

Subscribe to other channels. Just like following people on Twitter gets you your own followers, subscribing to other YouTube channels will get subscribers for your channel.

YouTube has an active social networking community. Invite your friends, and extend friend invitations to kindred souls. Friend the most popular channels in your field. Thank subscribers for subscribing by posting comments on their channels. Engage members of the various categories of channels, especially the Reporters channel. Participate in the community and you’ll attract subscribers.

You should create a special landing page on your Website for each of your videos. This page should be tailored for visitors who have arrived from YouTube, perhaps by addressing them directly — “Welcome YouTube viewer! Here’s more information on <the subject of the video>.” Be sure to include links to your other relevant videos and to actions the visitors can take on your site. Put buttons for the most important actions right on the landing page.

Creating landing pages is way better than dumping YouTube visitors right onto your main page — never do this — or even to an appropriate generic internal page. Take the time to customize your experience and embrace your YouTube community.

Depending on the video, up to 70 percent of people may view your YouTube videos from other sites, such as sites with embedded players, blogs, search engines, and the like, and thus many people will find your video by doing a search, either on YouTube or on Google or other search engine. Consequently, you need to search-engine-optimize your videos.

Script Your Video

While an exhaustive description of this topic is beyond the scope of this post (and our book, Be a Person- The Social Operating Manual for Enterprises – bit.ly/BeAPersonEFull ) here are some quick recommendations for the script of your video:

• Keep it Short — The average length of a YouTube video is a little more than four minutes, but you should target between two and three minutes. If your issue is complex, break your video into several self-contained pieces and link them together using the tools YouTube provides.
• Explain Your Solution — Right up front, tell about your business and the problem you solve, not necessarily the products that solve it. Include enough detail so that the viewer can decide to complete viewing the video. It’s best to use a real person on-screen for this portion of your video so you can better engage your audience.
• Avoid Shocking Video at the Start — If your solution involves human tragedy or anything icky, don’t open with graphic footage. Create a relationship with your viewer and get them involved before hitting them with emotional footage. Such footage can be very effective and dramatic, but should probably be used sparingly, after establishing a connection with the viewer.
• Build Empathy — If the problem you solve is emotional, don’t be afraid to empathically build a common bond with the viewer. Encourage an emotional response, and then tie those emotions to your call to action.
• Empower Your Viewers — If you have a call to action but viewers can’t immediately act — by clicking a link to go to your site or by clicking right through to a Buy It Now button — you’ll lose the immediacy of the moment. Your video has affected your viewer, and he or she wants to act, now. Give them a way to buy right now, go to your site, follow you on Twitter, join your Facebook page, and subscribe to your blog feed. Show how taking an action will make a difference. Communicate that the viewer can make a difference by taking action now. Encourage viewers to create a video response to your video and link back to you.
• Create a Sense of Urgency — Emphasize why your viewers need to take action now. If you are after sales or even donations, indicate a deadline for a sweepstakes or discount or other information to foster urgency.
• Feed Back — If you have success with a video, make another video praising those who helped make that success and link it to the first video.

Consider creating a transcript of your video and using YouTube’s capability to add it as captioning.[1] This not only improves the accessibility of the video, but it may affect the indexing of it by search engines as well.

Once you upload the video, you’ll want to control the thumbnail image that displays in search listings.[2] YouTube offers you three thumbnails, using frames from the beginning, middle, and end (at the ¼, ½, and ¾ marks), and says you can’t offer a different one. While this is technically true, Michael Gray[3] figured out that, if you put the image you want to be your thumbnail in the exact middle of your video,[4] you’ll be able to select that image from the three that YouTube offers you. You have to be a little bit advanced in your video editor use to do this, however.

In addition to captioning, there are a variety of other things you can do to a video once it’s been uploaded. You can annotate it, which means to superimpose little text bubbles on the video. Audio Swap lets you replace your entire audio track with a selected song or other audio track. You can also change the title, description, and tags.

Figure 1 — Post-Upload Modification of YouTube Videos

To create a video, you’ll need some way to capture images or video. If you have a mobile phone camera, that may be good enough. Otherwise, there are several very inexpensive cameras that produce surprisingly good videos.

You’ll need a way to get your videos onto a computer (although some cameras will let you post raw video from your camera directly to YouTube). And you’ll probably want a way to edit the video and audio, add background music and titles, and integrate video from multiple sources. Many operating systems now come with simple video editing programs such as Microsoft Windows Movie Maker and Apple’s iMovie. There are plenty of free, shareware, and commercial video editors as well, of varying capabilities and complexity.

Using one of these programs, you’ll need to save a file in one of the formats YouTube accepts, including:

• WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)
• .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files — (typically supporting h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)
• .AVI (Many cameras output this format — typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM)
• .MPEGPS (Typically supporting MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)
• .WMV
• .FLV (Adobe Flash — FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)

That list may be a bit bewildering for the novice. Just look at your video editor’s output or Save As menu and see if it mentions any of the file extensions or types above. More than likely, it will output .AVI and possibly .MPEG4. No matter what output type you use, YouTube is going to re-encode it anyway. If you’re a video expert, see their advanced encoding advice.

Your video is generally limited to 15 minutes. You can increase the time limit by following YouTube’s instructions.  It appears that YouTube now permits files to be more than 20GB but keep in mind that a) your browser may not permit uploading files of that size and b) YouTube will really compress (get rid of detail) the clip so that it takes up less space on their servers. The more the file is compressed, the poorer the resulting video quality is.

It may seem daunting, but the basics are actually pretty easy to master with a bit of study.

Be sure that if you use any copyrighted material from other sources that you get permission, and post a notice of that permission at the end of your video. YouTube is committed to removing illegally-posted content from their service.