| Internet Distribution There are four significant Internet silo strategies for video distribution including your website home page, YouTube, Vimeo and social media sites. Your Home Page: Most websites feature media widgets for displaying video, pictures or PowerPoint presen- tations. If your home page doesn't have a media widget, you may only need to access the website administration section and turn the media widget on. Some websites will allow you to upgrade your existing website plat- form to accommodate a media wid- get for little to no cost. YouTube: No other website platform delivers that audience. (But Facebook is taking a run at them.) The demo- graphic information YouTube pro- vides is priceless: gender, age, audience location as well as clicks per video episode. First-time-uploaders to You- Tube will be restricted to 15 minutes of video play time. However, YouTube awards popular content, measured again in clicks with premier status, so there's no editing for videos over 15 minutes. Vimeo: It's for the serious video artisan or professional industrial video producer. The audience isn't as large as YouTube, but it is a higher- end audience that watches docu- mentaries, short films and personal interest videos on subjects such as money. Social Media: Networking with social media is huge and distribut- ing video universal resource loca- tors (URLs) with a small descrip- tion of the video content is increas- ingly showing up the walls of Face- book, Twitter and LinkedIn. If visi- tors to your website or social media page like the description, they can simple click on the URL and view your video immediately. Remem- ber that word "immediately." The path to social media success is he who clicks the least to arrive at a destination. We, personally, use a talk show for- mat in the Business Insurance Zone that uses "edutainment," a fast-moving con- versation style with "verbal volleyball" exchange. | Social Media Websites Facebook: The most critical component in using Facebook as a market- ing tactic is discerning the difference between "transactional" and "relational." Face- book is relational. Transactional market- ing that focuses on sales, company pub- lic relations or shameless self-promotion will never receive traction on Facebook. Corporations that have popular Face- book accounts post employee events such as holiday parties, business sponsored team sports, newsworthy social items of the firm such as weddings and even the birth of employee babies. (Yes, the births of a baby, baby showers, baby anything.) Facebook is relational and the rules of Facebook engagement were written by women. Facebook is the estrogen zone. Here's another Facebook story, and a tribute to women. A six-figure producer (who we will call Johnny) set up a website and posted Facebook, Twitter and Linke- dIn on his home page. Then he wrote some PR copy about his company on all three social sites. A couple months went by with no visits, no traffic and no action. It went nowhere. He dipped his toe into social media and it was cold as ice. Then we had a conversation with Johnny and his wife. Johnny's wife has 364 friends in her Facebook community. One day she posted this comment on her wall: "Hey everyone! Johnny and I took his clients out to the Brio (an Italian restaurant) over the weekend. Johnny and I split the shrimp pasta mega dish and his clients had the chicken primavera and alfredo fettuccine. The food was great. The atmosphere was fantastic. We heartily recommend the Brio!" Ninety-two of 114 responses had this inquiry insert in some form, "clients? What's Johnny do for a living?" Her reply, "He helps people save for their retirement and their kids' education and makes sure they don't pay any more taxes than they need to." Result: 14 client appointments! Facebook is relational. Soft sell, indirect marketing using social events with clients like dinner, weddings, babies and client appreciation events get traction. |
To improve your Facebook impressions or views you need "Edge Rank," "Sharibil- ity," and "AIDA." Edge Rank uses phrases like today, limited-time only and exclu- sive. Sharibility uses the best, the most, why or how. AIDA stands for Atten- tion, Interest, Desire, Action -- all criti- cal components of social media, specifi- cally Facebook. (Tweeting uses shortened URLs for space utilization, but for Face- book include the full link URL. It's 300 percent more likely to be clicked.) Twitter: Tweets are 140 character messages, including the punctua- tion and spaces. It takes a real wordsmith to pound out pithy phrases and platitudes down to 140 characters and form a meaning- ful message. There are two techniques to lever- age Internet communications. The most popular is called "unbundling." For example: Take a 1,200 word arti- cle. Inside that article are two 600-word mini-articles, four 300 word blogs and an estimated 16 to 20 tweets. The other technique is building an article from related tweets. The idea comes from a website called "Storify." Surprisingly, many Twitter topics have common themes, so 30-40 tweets can be mad into a full story or mini article. There are tweet launchers for Twit- ter that can distribute to all your social media sites at one time and allow you to schedule multiple tweets, day and night for weeks or even months in advance. Scheduling tweets ties a message to a recognized seasonal event such as a blockbuster movie as well as a sporting or historical event. For example: "Trans- formers Premieres Tonight! Tomorrow, transform your business into the pre- miere practice via social media market- ing & HD1080p video." Coattail tweets are messages that shadow breaking news or headlines.
|
