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I recently read a article which kind of always confirmed my suspicions about who were the leaders in video platforms. That study showed that YouTube and Facebook were considered the first- and second-most effective video platforms for marketing—in that order. Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter were middle-of-the-pack finishers when it came to effectiveness. But one interesting result was that Snapchat was in last place for usage. Nearly 90% of respondents said they'd never used Snapchat's video advertising features. Snapchat has long focused its efforts on mature markets in North America and Europe, where more money is spent on video advertising and where consumers tend to have more advanced smartphones capable of handling the app's intense data and processor requirements. The study also showed another weakness of spending advertising dollars on Snapchat at least those who were trying the platform for marketing. Only 27% thought it was an effective channel, raising questions about the platform's ability to deliver a solid ROI.
The article also showed that LinkedIn was an often overlooked as a video advertising platform. In the study, just 38% of marketers polled posted video content on LinkedIn, 75% of them thought it to be a successful way of reaching target audiences. While LinkedIn is most often thought of as a business-focused platform, it has also avoided many of the brand safety problems recently suffered by YouTube and Facebook, perhaps increasing its appeal among marketers. Kind of food for thought on using video and where marketing and advertising dollars seem to be most effective. -Roy
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A recent report stated that only 9% of small businesses have created their own You Tube channel. As YouTube usage continues to soar, don't let your business be one of the ones that are left behind. It does not take all that long to get your channel up and running. And once it is up, fresh content is very key to get customers or clients to your channel to grow your business.
Today, I would like to take a moment to help you go through the steps to get your You Tube Channel up and running. As always, feel free to reach out to us if you have any problems. Having a fantastic content strategy on YouTube will help you build your brand’s identity, showcase your products, and connect with your audience in fresh and exciting ways. So with all that in mind, let's take a look at what you need to do. To create a YouTube account for your business, you’ll need to first create a personal Google+ profile as well as a Google+ page for your business. Once you have that taken care of, you’ll be ready to get your YouTube channel. 1. Login to the Google+ account associated with your business and head over to the YouTube Channel Switcher. 2. You should see your personal account as well as the option to create a new account for your Google+ business page. Click on your business page. 3. A pop-up will appear asking you to confirm that you’d like to create a channel for your business. Click ‘OK’. 4. Another pop-up will appear notifying you that your YouTube channel and Google+ page will now be connected. Click ‘OK’ again. 5. Well now look at that. You’re now the proud owner of a YouTube business channel. Customizing Your YouTube Channel Now that you’ve set up a YouTube channel for your business, you now need to get it looking at the very least, functional with good graphics and easy to navigate. Here are a few easy things that you can do to give your channel a more professional look and make sure that your customers know how to find you online. Channel Icon By default, your Channel Icon will be linked to your Google+ profile photo. I know hardly anyone uses Google+ much anymore but that is the nature of the beast. Although your image only needs to show up as a 98 x 98 pixel icon, it’s recommended that your picture should be a JPG, BMP, PNG, or non-animated GIF and at least 800 x 800 pixels. Channel Art Adding channel art is a great way to show off your brand’s personality and create a more visually engaging YouTube profile. Your Channel Art should be under 4MB and at least 2048 x 1152 pixels (although YouTube recommends going with 2560 x 1440 pixels for best results on all devices). Details and Description To unlock all of the customization options for your channel, you’ll need to click the gear icon in the section beneath your Channel Art. A pop-up titled ‘Channel settings’ will then appear. Look for the ‘Customize the layout of your channel’ option and enable it. Click ‘Save’. You’ll now be given a wider range of options sorted into five tabs: Home, Videos, Playlists, Channels, and About. Click on the About tab to edit your business details. Under description, give a brief outline of your business,your products, and services. Be sure to also include your contact email as well. For your social media links, include all of your business’ social media profiles (you can get your links to appear over your Channel Art by adjusting the drop down menu). On the right hand side, you’ll find a section titled ‘Featured Channels’ where you can feature other YouTube channels that are owned by your brand or managed by your employees. While this section may not be useful to you yet, once you expand your YouTube presence it will definitely come in handy. Using Great Content Now that the basics of setting up your channel is done, you need videos right? Your videos should be an integral part of every business’ content marketing strategy - it’s a fantastic way to provide your customers with high-quality, informative, and entertaining content that keeps them coming back again and again. So, with that in mind, let’s explore how you can use video to build an audience for your brand. Here are some of the different types of content your business could be using. Educational Content More and more, people are turning to YouTube to learn new things. In fact, searches for “how-to” videos are growing by 70% year over year which means that there is an expanding opportunity for businesses to capture new audiences by providing educational content around their products. Videos that teach new skills are great for building trust with your audience. If you build trust, you build potential customers. Educational content doesn’t have to be limited to teaching people how to fix your products either. You can also create video tutorials that show customers how they could be using your products to solve everyday problems. Brand Storytelling When it comes to creating compelling video content, few things are more effective than great storytelling. Inspiring videos that fit into your business’ identity are perfect for communicating your brand’s image and ideals to a wider audience. These types of inspirational videos should be geared towards building a lifestyle around your brand and showing customers that when they purchase your products, they aren’t just buying a thing - they’re buying an experience. Marketing your brand (not you) is going to go a ling way in creating not only identity but followers as well. Entertainment Building a YouTube strategy around fun videos that cater to your audience’s interests is one of the best ways to capture viewers’ attention and focus it onto your products. While their sense of humor may not be for everyone, funny or entertaining videos are undoubtedly effective. Everyone likes a good laugh. Keep those videos short however. Today's tuber surfers don't spend a lot of time on any one video and you got to capture their attention in about the first 3 seconds. Optimizing Your Videos for Search Staying on top of your YouTube SEO is critical if you want to get your videos noticed. Every minute, 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, so you need to be doing everything you can to stand out from the crowd. Every element of your videos - from the title to the description to keywords - can have a huge impact on how prominently they get featured in search results. Here is how you can improve your ranking on You Tube and get in front of viewers when they need to see you most. Keywords Before you start optimizing your videos, you should narrow down which keywords you’ll be focusing on. Think about which keywords someone might search to come across your video and run them through a keyword planning tool to make sure that they’re popular search terms. This can also be a solid source of inspiration for future videos - it’s a good idea to experiment with keywords and build future content around popular search terms in your industry. Engagement One of the most important things that YouTube takes into consideration when determining the quality of your video is its engagement. Encourage your viewers to leave a comment, subscribe, share, favorite, or hit the ‘Thumbs Up’ button after they’ve finished watching to increase your chance of showing up higher in search results. If you want to boost your engagement levels, try running a contest. Giveaways and contests are an excellent way to increase viewer participation and connect with your audience. When YouTube is determining your rank, it will also take your video’s view count into consideration. To increase your viewers quickly, make sure that you’re distributing your new videos through your email list and all of your business’ social media channels. Format The actual format of your video also plays a role in your overall search ranking. Although Youtube can’t watch your videos to determine their content, there are a few other things that it looks at to make an "educated" guess. • Filename: Be sure to include your target keywords in the name of the file that you’re uploading. Youtube will pay attention to it. • Length: YouTube considers longer videos to be of higher value, so try to make them as substantial as possible. • Title: The title of your video should be concise, descriptive, and feature your target keyword near the start. • Description: The longer the description, the better. Add as much content as you possibly can - include a detailed overview of everything in your video and any relevant resources that your viewers might need. Your keywords should also show up in your description. • Tags: You don’t have to overload the tags on your videos to get a better ranking, but do your best to include your target keywords and a handful of other associated terms. Tips and Tricks After covering everything above, you should be on your way to building an audience and maximizing your business’ potential on YouTube. However, if you’re feeling a little adventurous, I’ve put together some nifty YouTube hacks that you can use to increase your subscribers and generate more traffic for your website. Add a Watermark A watermark is perfect for driving new viewers back to your channel and encouraging them to subscribe. These customized images will be overlaid on every one of your uploads and link back to your channel, making it easy for new viewers to find more of your videos. To add a watermark to your videos, take a look at your channel page and click on ‘Video Manager’. This should take you to the Creator Studio where you’ll be able to access some more in-depth settings for your account. Once you get to the Creator Studio, click on ‘Channel’ in the sidebar. A drop down will appear under ‘Channel’. Click on ‘Branding’ and then ‘Add a Watermark’. You’ll now be able to upload an image that will show up in the corner of every one of your videos. Enable an Automatic Subscription Prompt It’s important to not only be driving people to your YouTube channel, but to also be encouraging them to subscribe while they’re there. Whenever you provide a link to your channel, add “?sub_confirmation=1” to the end of your channel’s URL and a pop-under will automatically appear on your channel prompting visitors to subscribe. Link Merchant Cards to Your Website As long as your account is verified, in good standing, and following YouTube’s community guidelines, you’ll be able to add Merchant Cards to your videos. If you have a e-commerce type of store, you can use Merchant Cards to link your viewers directly to your store to buy the items featured in your videos. If you want to add Merchant Cards to your videos, just head to your Video Manager and click on ‘Edit’ for the video that you’d like to add a card to. At the top of your screen, several tabs will appear. Click ‘Cards’ and then ‘Link Cards’ and then add in the information for your products. I hope the above tips will help you get into the world of video for your business using You Tube. Good luck! -Roy  Three quarters of all mobile traffic will be used for video in 2023, according to a recent report by telecommunications equipment company Ericsson. That’s up from just over half of all traffic today.
Not only will that be a bigger share but also a huge opportunity for your busiiness, as more people watch more video on their smartphones. Overall, worldwide mobile data traffic will increase to 110 exabytes per month in 2023, according to Ericsson, or the equivalent of 5.5 million years of streaming HD video. It’s eight times the 14 exabytes per month we used in 2017. What does this mean for consumers? Well, obviously, we’ll need a bigger data plan. Currently, smartphone owners around the globe use on average 2.9 gigabytes of data per month, making 2GB to 5GB data plans the most popular. But as average usage rises to 17GB by 2023, bigger or unlimited mobile data plans will be necessary. More mobile video traffic also means there will be an increased emphasis on mobile video for advertisers. Social media consumption on mobile is also rising, but not as fast as video. Therefore, social media will represent a smaller share of mobile traffic in 2023 — eight percent — than its current 12 percent of mobile traffic. Video is here to stay and it is growing at an alarming rate. Social Media and Video will always be mated in platforms however video will be the big brother as technology progresses. -Roy FDMC Digital Media LLC  Being that our firm works with digital video on an almost daily basis, we do a lot of reading and research on the platform. Digital Video is growing at a rapid pace and the platforms that deliver the media is ever changing as well. Recently we came across some interesting statistics we wanted to share. Consumers will dramatically increase their overall time spent watching digital video from the rest of this year to 2021. That is a given. A data based company called Activate recently evaluated extensive data on creators with over 10 million views on YouTube and found that 24% of these creators account for 71% of views. Over on Facebook, 26% of creators account for 77% of views. Both of these groups of top creators have over 50 million views on these social video platforms. Activate’s analysis of the data confirms that influencers and media companies make up 97% of YouTube views in this group of top video creators with more than 50 million views. And 98% of Facebook views come from influencers and media companies. Brands only make up 3% of the views on these platforms. Influencers are defined as personalities, celebrities or public figures with significant social presence. Media companies are defined as organizations whose primary business model is in production and/or distribution of content. This includes some professional influencer entities that have moved upstream.
How Brands Can Find the Right Content Partners to Work With The data shows that there is a greater ratio of influencers to media companies on YouTube (83% influencers to 17% media companies) and a roughly even ratio on Facebook (52% influencers to 48% media companies). So, if brands are looking for the right content partner to reach the right audience, and get more engagement for less spend, then they need to look in different categories on different platforms. Activate analyzed the top five YouTube influencers by subscribers in four categories: How-to & Style People & Blogs Comedy & Entertainmen and Gaming. They concluded: Top web video influencers range across content areas and platforms. Combined, these influencers have over 70 billion views on YouTube. And all of these influencers have a strong presence on a second platform, ranging from Instagram (13) or Twitch (5) to Facebook (2). Activate also analyzed data for the top U.S. media company creators on YouTube and found 49% are in the Entertainment category 22% are in Music & Dance and 9% are in News & Politics. Next, Activate analyzed for the top U.S. media company creators on Facebook and found 61% are in the Entertainment category and 10% are in News & Politics Web video platforms satisfy different content preferences along with media companies which will need to play to each platform’s strengths. Their analysis extends beyond YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch; it includes Instagram and Snapchat, too. The research summarizes that attracting theses these creators and to capture user attention, web video platforms are attempting to move into each others’ turfs.” So, watch initiatives like YouTube Red, YouTube Live, YouTube TV, Facebook Live, and Facebook Watch like a hawk. The video segmentation matrix is shifting almost in real time i.e. day to day. Social Video and the Shift to Live-streaming Activate also analyzed live streaming. The medium has exhibited rapid growth in views and time spent. It shows Twitch, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, as the leader in this category (with 743,000 average live streaming viewers), followed by YouTube Live (with 318,000), Facebook Live (with 61,000), and Periscope (with 23,000. Activate also predicts” Live-streaming creators will use crowdfunding platforms, such as Patreon, to monetize directly through fans. The data given to Activate was provided by Tublar Insight Labs. -Roy  Are you aiming to get more traction from your blog or website’s content through social media shares and re tweets? Perhaps your goal is get a 180 on your links. If this is the case may I suggest you take a deep dive into your visual content that you post.
It has been tested time and true that by using images: · Your presentations that are accompanied by visual aids have been proven to be 43 percent more effective. · We are all visual learners one way or another · Of all the information that is processed by the brain, 90% of it is visual stimulation. Hopefully this week's blog post t will give you some insight on various types of visual content that will help you grow your online growth and engagement. Images That Will Engage Your Readers Splitting up the body of text on your posts with high quality, exciting images that are relevant to your story idea will compel your audience to continue reading what you’ve written all the way to the end. Images sell your written information! Sadly, today, our attention spans have hit a new low. Without those images our readers today refuse to read any long blogs or content. Articles containing images receive 94 percent more views as compared to those that don’t have any images. Tweets that are posted with images are re tweeted 150 percent more compared to those that are composed of text only. Facebook posts that are posted with images receive 3x more engagement than posts that don’t have any images. Image quotes: For whatever reason, people love to share quotes that are either written within the image or directly below it. Images that evoke emotions: A simple thought provoking image captures the heart or the soul of many of your engaged audience and will get you a share of that image. Screenshots: Screenshots are an effective since they give your audience a first-hand perspective of how your product or service works. An excellent example is a screenshot of your app as you use it, to give the consumers a kind of visual proof that your app actually does what your marketing messages claim. This way, your audience will trust you more as they have verified your claims. Essentially, screenshots are the best way to secure the trust of your consumers as they can easily confirm for themselves using their own eyes. Memes: “Meme” refers to an image that is accompanied by an amusing caption. When memes started gaining viral popularity online, no one ever thought that they would end up becoming an integral part of online marketing. For instance, if your brand is aimed at engaging a younger demographic, then memes are an excellent choice for creating inside jokes in your trade. This kind of humor is a remarkably effective way of bringing your audience together. Memes are a great source of entertainment, they are the most common types of viral social media content that has the potential to get millions of shares. Slides & Presentations: Currently, slides are an effective means of expanding your brand’s outreach as they allow you to educate and communicate with your audience.Just slides and presentations largely depend of color and design in order to convey the message or information in the most effective manner. Always make sure that your slides are not only engaging, but they should also give the consumers solid advice that is practical and create action. Presentations usually contain several slides, you have to have some consistency in the design, color and even the font so that your message and/or information stays streamlined as the audience consumes it bit by bit. Video Content: If you want to show how effective a solution your product is, there’s no better way of doing it than using a video. And for your video to be effective it must be engaging, educational, and entertaining. This is my fave. There are other cheaper, less complicated forms of visual content advertisements – but then again, you’ll realize that going that extra mile to create a quality video is totally worth all the trouble. Video has more engagement than any of the other type of digital content. With all the potential that videos present for your business, you should be very particular with the types of videos that you use to enhance the strength of your brand. Some of the best types of marketing videos are customer testimonials, demonstrations, how to videos and even explainer videos. As an example, you can start your video by presenting a common problem, then finishing the video with the solution that your product offers. When properly executed, visual content also gets you more links and your readers will share it more among their peers, which is overall, free advertisement for you! -Roy |
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