Lights, Camera, Action on Video Marketing November 19, 2009
Video Marketing as a Social Media Tool
Video marketing is an important tool that you must have in your toolbox if you’re going to be successful in social media today. However, it’s an easy area of social media marketing to get wrong. Businesses that are trying to learn how to create an effective social media strategy are struggling a little bit with what role video marketing plays in this. The key to using video as a social media marketing tool is to remember the purpose and rules of social media.
Social media differs greatly from traditional media. Although it serves a similar purpose today (making the public aware of and interested in your business) it is an entirely different playing field. Traditional marketing is a one-way process; you put out information and it is received by the public. Social media marketing is an interactive process; you create something and put it out there where the public can promote it, share it, respond to it and interact with you about it. This is what needs to be kept in mind as you start to do video marketing.
The videos that you create for social media marketing are going to differ from the types of videos that you create for a commercial or even a video ad on your website. You don’t want your video to be overtly selling anything because that goes against the basic code of social media marketing. Instead, you want to create something that interests and intrigues your viewers so that they can share it and interact with others about. The most obvious example is to create a funny video and to post it to YouTube where others can comment on it and share it with one another.
Just being on YouTube isn’t enough for a good video-based social media marketing campaign today, though. You want to get creative to make your video campaign as interactive as possible. For example, you might plan a series of videos. The first video could have a cliffhanger ending and you could then hold a contest on your blog requesting the best ideas from viewers about how the second video should start. Promote this around the web using other social media tools (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) so it gets a lot of attention and then create your second video based on the response. This level of interaction online is what social media is really all about.
