"Online video is driving astonishing innovation in thousands of different fields ranging from the ultra-niche to the sharing of truly world-changing ideas" – Chris Anderson, TED
Betyah, a new mobile app where you can “bet with your friends on everything from sports & reality TV to celebrity gossip & personal showdowns” wanted a fun video to showcase what the app was all about.
So they came to Wooshii and set up their project, starting a pitching phase from creatives all over the world.
In the end, Betyah chose community member FOCii to make their video and this is the (awesome) final result:
Building a well-rounded library of video content is quite a feat on its own. However, a lot of clips and videos won’t necessarily boost your bottom line by themselves. Video is usually used as just one part of a larger social marketing scheme, especially when it is being leveraged by a large and competitive corporation. Video success relies on sharing, discussion and other social media activities. Look into techniques for turning a Youtube page into an instant community if you want amazing returns on your investment.
Embrace Comments, Even Bad Ones
Keeping spam and inappropriate content out of your comment sections does require a little extra work. For most producers, the interaction provided by commenting can’t be beaten. Encouraging feedback from viewers is the easiest way to learn what your visitors want to see in your next releases. If you don’t have the time or staff to respond personally to every comment on your content, pick a few for each week and send off quick replies to show that there is a human behind your company.
Encourage Early Activity
Snagging a high spot on the Youtube search rankings requires a lot of social activity on your page. It’s best if you can get comments and shares early on with each clip. The biggest boost in rankings will come from the attention your video gets in its first 48 hours. As soon as the upload ends, send links through all of your distribution networks. Companies without social distribution plans should create a basic model of sharing content before developing very many video clips. Failing to share your content properly with viewers you already know are interested could cause you to fall behind your competitors when searchers look for keywords related to your content.
Get Talking
Setting up a separate account that is clearly linked to your company could help you kick off the conversation with viewers in the comments section. Use this employee or branded account to make an initial comment and break the ice. Many times a single comment is effective at starting a deluge of notes and recommendations. Don’t try to hide the connection between the account and your brand or you run the risk of appearing to fake interest in your own content. Kick off a lively discussion by asking a question or requesting feedback from people who watch the clip.
It is still practically impossible to predict how popular a specific video might become over the weeks and months. However, certain metrics can be measured when videos are viewed. These metrics seem to be tied to the action of sharing content on a social network. Since social sharing is a major part of making a viral video hit, Unruly has created a tool to provide insight on the “shareability” of a specific clip. Investing in the information provided by this company could be worthwhile if you’re sure you need a viral hit to spark up business.
The Chart
This new algorithm for predicting the power of a video was released by Unruly in February. The company designed it as yet another part of their full testing and analysis lab for video popularity. They have developed multiple techniques for social tracking to create a chart that shows the rise and fall of viral video trends. The Viral Video Chart contains data on all of the metrics the company has found linked to success after release. This chart includes data from more than 300 billion streams to provide a quick glimpse of the entire industry.
What You Get
The ShareRank programme involves real viewing tests with over 150 people. At least 100 people used for the test will be from the target demographic of the company. This provides a greater view into the mind of the customer you want to attract. Viewers interact with the content and report about its good points and unattractive features. If you notice a constant theme in the comments, you can quickly adjust your video marketing efforts to see greater returns in weeks. This kind of flexibility is rarely provided by other kinds of video analysis. Finding out your ShareRank is one step in the journey towards creating your own viral hit. The company reports an 80% rate of success among the companies that used the data gathered to create a content strategy for video.
Building Bridges
Use the ShareRank information to change both new and old content for maximum effect. Make existing clips more visible by determining why viewers aren’t finding your content when searching the web. Ensure new material fits the needs of consumers and determine which social networks to target, with one round of intensive testing. You should ultimately integrate the information from Unruly with other research to create a complete distribution plan across multiple platforms.
Twitter’s native video sharing application is certainly limited in its abilities. Vine can only support six second clips and the videos are cycled endlessly on the pages of your followers. However, marketers can use this platform for their own benefit if they use these limitations to their advantage.
Request Interaction
Try announcing a contest or requesting short viewer testimonials by creating your own quick Vine clip. You could show off the prize for a competition or share the pertinent details of a big event. Motivating a specific action is much easier with an engaging format like video.
Demonstrate Your Product
Nothing can beat a quick 360 degree view of the very item you are hoping to sell. A short glimpse into a service is just as tantalising when viewed by a motivated consumer. Visual communication is very effective, so use Vine to capture real footage of your product.
Get Cheeky
Humour is often harder to pull off in a longer video. A six second flash of a silly idea is less likely to stray into staleness or veer towards a shock factor. Capture a visual pun related to your company or product, such as the gecko used in ads for GEICO.
Well the GoPro camearas have become so good and inexpensive that people start doing some awesome stuff with them – stuff that was prohibitively expensive and unimaginable for someone outside a movie studio just a few years ago.
Case in point: bullet time, that special effect made famous with the first Matrix movie. That’s exactly what Marc Donahue of Permagrin Films set out to do, grouping several GoPros together.
The results are amazing, check it out:
Yep, you read that right, 12 animations!
Gteq wanted to overhaul their website and have it completely lead with video – so they came to Wooshii.
We produced 12 videos for them which covered every aspect of their service.
Creative was Mike Dunkin, and all of the videos are now the main part of Gteq’s website.
Karl McCaffrey (Group CEO) said about their new videos:
We have had many positive responses. These include the online department for a daily tabloid! Everyone loves it!
Seem them all here:
About Us
Mobile
NTS
SMS
Connectivity
Mobile PBX
M2M
Lync
Billing
Phone Systems
Gteq Sparks
Contact Us
Youtube installed content rating flags for any clips designated as television shows or movies, but shorter clips went without content warnings for years. The platform unceremoniously added a three colour system for partners to start experimenting with on March 15th. As this system develops with the help of the partners, it may be made available to other producers and uploaders. One visit to the Content Manager page is all you need to adjust the warnings on any content if you are a Youtube partner.
Green, Red and Yellow
The system uses the classic setup of red, yellow and green colours to help viewers decide if they want to watch mature content. When you assign a green colour to a clip, you are certifying that it is free from questionable content in numerous categories. The yellow rating should be used if a small amount of questionable material is present in the video. Videos with strong themes, explicit imagery or other potentially offensive content should be marked with a red flag. The categories for rating controversial material include violence, adult language, sexual themes or imagery, physical and verbal violence, drug references or usage and nudity.
When to Rank
It’s important to use these rankings if you want content to appeal to families. Even adult language that is covered with a bleep should trigger a yellow rating on the clip. This ensures that viewers can block the content from appearing to children, so they can explore safe and age appropriate materials. Red ratings won’t necessarily keep adult viewers from watching your clips, but it will help sensitive individuals avoid any material that would offend or upset them. This shows that your company respects the feelings of people searching for the right video content to watch.
Youtube has clear guidelines on how content producers should rank their own materials, but they don’t require these types of flags yet. It’s totally optional and voluntary for partners that simply want to make their content more accessible. Only time will tell how this feature is accepted and used by the biggest partners. If it is widely embraced by the biggest publishers, it may become the new standard for flagging mature content. This could help partners working with Youtube gain more legitimacy among people who are used to the television and movie rating systems that have been in use for decades.
Each day, millions of viewers have to wait for their video clips to load or deal with choppy playback. Long buffering times drive away viewers before they get a chance to hear your message or view your content. New research recently released by Conviva shows that slow buffering rates are costing businesses across the globe a lot of money. Adjusting your file sizes and choosing the right platforms for hosting will help you keep your downloads and streaming clips moving smoothly for all viewers.
2012 Losses
Conviva’s study shows that businesses lost an estimated $2.1 billion during 2012 due to delayed starting or buffering issues. More than 22 billion views were analysed for loading issues and viewing interruptions, as well as the total amount of time viewers spent watching the content. The study included 150 different producers. Viewers spent over 124 billion minutes waiting for buffers to load, which constitutes the full lifespan of 89 people. An immense amount of time is simply being wasted when viewers have to wait on slow loading content.
Immediate Escape
Many viewers won’t stick around to wait for buffering if the clip pauses before playing for more than a few seconds. Conviva’s research found that 60% of people that abandoned a short clip before the end left at the two to three second mark. You need to get your content rolling within a second and a half if you want to capture people’s attention. This can be tricky because the average initial load times for common devices are over two seconds long. Load times on Android devices were nearly three seconds on average, with Xbox coming in at only one and a half seconds to start playing a video. Careful optimisation for mobile platforms can help you to come in ahead of the curve with quick load times.
Quality Counts
Poor image and sound quality also contributed to the billions of dollars lost by video publishers. The research showed that a full 40% of videos were marked as low quality or faced bitrate issues during delivery. The numbers also demonstrated that viewers watched as much as 250% more content when the experience runs smoothly with high quality. For live streaming content alone, viewership rose from an average of 18 minutes to 121 minutes as quality improved. It’s essential to take the time to optimise your content to ensure a smooth streaming experience.
Selling products or services over the Internet requires you to stay on top of the latest trends in various marketing niches. If you have been working hard on your video empire, you need to decide whether to focus the majority of your promotional efforts on SEO or social sharing. As viewers evolve in their consumption of content, it’s important to change your strategy. The Internet’s largest search engines are giving surprising weight to social media tracking. Using the power of Facebook, Twitter and other networks could give you the biggest boost in views.
Slow to Pick Up
Whilst Internet video has only been growing since the turn of the century, social network support for these formats has developed more slowly. Facebook still only partially supports video hosting and sharing on their platform. Twitter’s Vine service was the first native option for video and it has only been around for a few months now. However, building a social brand is easy with the tools provided by these companies. Integrating video into the networking mix is only natural. It’s also a surprisingly affordable way to market your business, especially when you compare it to the high costs of embedded video advertising.
Falling SEO Strategies
Keyword optimisation has been the primary tool for success in the search rankings for years, but the popularity of this tactic is slowly waning. Google, Bing and the other major search engines are giving more weight to shares and likes on social networks like Facebook. These dynamic and naturally generated links show that viewers are seriously interested in the content. Whilst using strong keyword phrases in the title and description is crucial, it’s simply not enough when your competitors are building complete social media strategies.
Combine Them
For the best results, it’s important to combine the best keyword optimisation strategies with a complete social media plan. Set goals and design complementary campaigns where the SEO content links to social pages and profiles. Building a plan like this requires quite a bit of research and forethought. Create a full plan that includes regular milestones to hit and scheduled reviews to help you readjust your goals. Putting up a few videos and failing to follow up on them will not provide a lot of valuable benefits to your business. Keep up with weekly and monthly updates on your social networks to ensure you stay in front of viewers.
Developing a video marketing campaign requires creativity to keep things fresh through consecutive releases. Many companies make the mistake of building content that is similar and follows the same basic model for each clip. However, this doesn’t really create a dynamic marketing campaign that draws the attention of a diverse customer base. Vary your approach with each new release to ensure visitors keep coming back for more. Learn about three efficient and attention catching formats for marketing videos.
The Quick Clip
Wrap up a 30 second video about your product or a big update to the company’s structure to create a quick invitation for viewers. These small blurbs are ideal for using as native advertising on your category or information pages. They can really round out written content and provide deeper meaning and insight. The key to a successful quick clip is context. The information should be useful and blend in well with the tone of the page it’s located on. These clips are ideal for social networks like Facebook, especially if you want to drive views to longer videos on your website or Youtube channel.
The Teaser
Sometimes 30 seconds of content is too much. If you are trying to capture viewers being distracted by other content, consider paring down your clip to 10 or 15 seconds. This is still long enough to flash your main product or show a happy, smiling customer. Avoid stuffing too much dialogue or glimpses of text into this content. The main benefit of the teaser is that it is a bite-sized clip that doesn’t overwhelm the viewer with too much at once. This makes it ideal for advertising where longer videos wouldn’t fit. For the biggest impact, connect the teaser with a longer clip that fills out the concept with more information.
The Natural Share
When you get customers that are happy about your product, consider capturing a few minutes of them discussing their satisfaction. It’s even better if you can find content from users that are sharing tutorials for assembling or using your product. These natural, genuine recommendations can’t be beaten by marketing straight from the company. Hunt down related and positive content and share it on your social networks. You can also encourage this kind of spontaneous content creation by holding a contest and requesting video submissions. The viewers can submit clips for you to edit together or load their content onto their own Youtube accounts.
