8 Comments »When looking for the best way to make videos go viral, too many marketers just upload their videos to YouTube and cross their fingers, hoping viewers like the content enough to forward on to their friends. Some try “guerrilla†tactics by repurposing social tools like Digg or Stumbleupon, marshaling a small army of friends and co-workers to drive up traffic, and hoping the effort makes a big enough splash to build momentum for their “video campaignâ€. Unfortunately these rudimentary practices are outdated and far from effective, so their video campaign is much more likely to flounder along with everyone else’s unwatched videos.
Rather than forcing social behavior into a publishing platform and putting all their eggs in the YouTube basket, forward thinking marketers are weaving video into truly social platforms like Facebook because they can take immediate advantage of existing behaviors and tools that are built into these networks. For example, Facebook users are already accustom to sharing links with their friends: they comment, send invites, post items to public places and talk about what they see – it’s a much more engaging experience for the audience than watching a video on YouTube. This behavior has a monumental impact on video campaigns, and from my experience, savvy marketers are excited about the early results they’re seeing.
Beyond traffic and word-of-mouth perks, using Facebook has other benefits for running a successful video campaign. It lets you better control, target and measure your campaign with an incredible level of detail, and has the openness as a platform to build custom functionality that cannot be built into a YouTube campaign. Things like custom players can have interactive options, deeper analytics or data collection features, and rich immersive user experiences. With the Facebook news feed, you also gain visibility and exposure to the entire network when users interact with your content. It’s also easier; you only have to learn one system, instead of learning how to stitch together multiple solutions to fit your needs.
No matter how you slice it, the experience on Facebook is inherently more social purely because of the users’ intentions when they are there, and that’s why savvy marketers are migrating their campaigns to these sites. If you have wondered how to improve your campaigns and generate virality for an engaged, participative, targeted audience, it might be time to think about using social networks.
Tyler Willis is Head of Marketing at Involver, a video marketing platform designed specifically for Facebook. Involver gives companies the opportunity to build, promote, manage and track video campaigns to targeted audiences.
Hey Nick,
Thanks for the opportunity to post, at Involver I see video marketers struggle with how to promote their products and the social nature of these platforms allow for a really solid solution for most of them.
Best,
Tyler Willis
Tyler@involver.com
i think you nailed it — effective marketing is much more than a chance to spread a message far and wide, it’s an opportunity to build community — giving marketers access to this as an explicit asset is a critical part of the future of rational brand marketing.
all of this discussion is re: facebook though — have you found these same tactics work in myspace et al?
Tyler,
Great call. For so long it seemed that you could upload a video, if it was half-way decent and you sent it to friends it should do well. The thing I’m curious about is what are other tactics to be deploying outside of FB to grow watchage of your video…
this is right on.
facebook is a content delivery platform at its core, and anything that can help better leverage this fact is a good bet these days when it comes to apps.
the games and other traditional “viral” fb apps are merely a side effect of the fact that people generally come to fb to waste time, so why not waste more. most fb apps remind me of the prostitution business in vegas — few people take trips there for sex, but if they’re already gambling and spending money, well, why not.
but there are rare exceptions to this — and the one thing they have in common is that they help content flow more easily and effectively and, if they’re good, provide avenues to actually act on the content. and if they’re really good, they can provide analytics on what’s happened so that businesses can understand it and pay for it.
video marketing is a great example of this. it’s an actual, real business model on facebook. imagine that.
Hey Tyler,
You do make some good points. Sounds like what you are suggesting is going beyond the traditional “advertise” on social networks approach by advocating a “participate” on social networks approach and that is a mindset I think a lot of companies and individuals need to adopt. I also think it’s important for companies to realize that youtube/facebook/etc. are TOOLS not strategies. It’s great that we have so many tools available but the success depends on how we use them. I’m a big advocate of “be clever and be creative.”
great post tyler
Thanks for the thoughtful comments, Tyler. I think you’re very right — deploying video intelligently is all-too-often ignored, but it’s perhaps even more important than the content of your video!
Video marketing is all about engagement (especially when compared to SEM and display ads). The same is true of social networks, which is why video is such a great fit for Facebook and MySpace marketing. If you go through the effort to create video advertising content, why waste the opportunity to put it in front of the most engaged audiences around?
Disclaimer: my company (http://silverdock.com/) has created a video marketing piece for Involver, so I know Tyler offline and may be biased by his extraordinary charm and exceptional attractiveness.
Excellent Post Tyler,
Tyler used to work as Senior Account Executive for us at my company, E. Mochila, Inc. (www.emochila.com). During his tenure we had many long discussions about the ramifications of the burgeoning of video on the Internet. We were very lucky to have Tyler produce several videos for our company as well. His knowledge of online video, its intricacies and marketing are very strong. This is reflected in every aspect of the work he’s done since leaving our firm. Great post Tyler. I look forward to learning more from you on this subject!
@rahmin We have found some success in other networks (particularly Myspace), and it’s clear that the underlying benefits of working in a social system exist there. However their developer platforms and APIs are not as robust as the ones Facebook has. We continue to work with other networks as they improve their systems.
@noah We should probably define doing well. Video doesn’t have a defined benchmark for success, even agencies have very different ideas about what’s successful (100k, 250k, 500k or 1 million seem to be common according to this survey: http://feedcompany.com/2008/10/viral-video-marketing-survey ). With goals like that, I don’t know how much success you’re usually able to make simply by including emails to friends, but at it’s core that’s the exactly right instinct. In my experience, creating a community that cares around your video is always the best path to success. Find a niche audience (whether that audience is friends or sci-fi geeks) and promote it there. Social platforms make it easier to target the right people, but appealing to an audience always begins with the creative.
@matt thanks. couldn’t agree more on the analytics, that’s always something we focus on providing to our clients and it has served us well.
@jacob I think the inherent benefit of being on a social system makes it much easier to help companies embrace the participation model (which I agree, is great at increasing the success of a campaign).