YOUR Social Media Video Marketing?

In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Salma Jafri breaks down how to promote yourself on social media.

Social media platforms, -- Facebook in particular -- love video content, and they're often built to help you make the most of your videos..

Related Article: Creating Successful Social Media Marketing Video's?

So, why are you using the same old tweets or Facebook posts to build your audience?

Instead, you should create a short video you can play on multiple platforms that previews your content. Look at Hollywood studios -- they don't just put an ad in a newspaper before a new blockbuster comes out. Instead, they plaster their trailers and promos all over social media to drive up enthusiasm and establish an audience.

Related Article: YOUR Fractionalized Video Content?

And, if Hollywood still feels the need to do this, it only makes sense that you should, too.

Guest Authored By Salma Jafri. Salma is the host of Content Marketing Tips - a weekly vlog + blog on how women entrepreneurs can market authentically to their audience by using their natural strengths. Grab her free cheat sheet: 25 Free and Feel-Good Ways To Authentically Promote Your Content. Follow Salma on Twitter.

Related Article: Instagram Marketing For YOUR Small Business?

Watch more YouTube videos from Salma Jafri on her channel..

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

YOUR Social Media Video View Count?

What counts as a video view on social media?

We’re in the midst of the great pivot to video, meaning viewing metrics are more important than ever.

Related Article: Why Advertisers Prefer Instagram Over Snapchat?

But what counts as a video view on social media? The answer depends on the platform.

The Media Rating Council (MRC) viewability standard for a digital video minimum view is when 50 percent of the video pixels are in view for two consecutive seconds, although they are currently considering whether to up this to 100 percent pixels in view, a change that could come by the end of 2018.

Facebook and Instagram used to count views at the three second mark, but Jason Hsiao, co-founder and chief video officer of Animoto, predicts they are shifting to adopt the current MRC standard, along with Twitter and LinkedIn. Facebook began offering two-second ad bids on videos in March 2018.

“It sounds like most of them are trying to standardize,” said Hsiao. “Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn all say they report a video view the same way which is two continuous seconds, or at least 50 percent of the video pixels, the real estate of the video, is actually in view.”

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YouTube has never specified exactly how long a video must be played to count as a view, although it’s widely believed to be around 30 seconds.

Instead, YouTube uses an algorithm to count views, which aims to differentiate between natural human views and those initiated by computer programs.

The company has been candid about how this reflects in view counts, in January 2018, saying “To verify that views are real and accurate, YouTube may temporarily slow down, freeze, or adjust the view count, as well as discard low-quality playbacks.” The view count freeze is most likely to occur in the few hours after a video is uploaded, as the algorithm cautiously determines which are legitimate views.

Its refusal to explicitly say how long a video must be watched to count as a view could be seen as an effort to get video creators focused on other, more meaningful metrics, ones that will help bolster videos in terms of suggested viewing, such as the amount of subscribers viewing a video shortly after it is released. That’s not to say that Watch Time is not an important metric to analyze, but the view count alone will not tell a marketer if their video is resonating with audiences.

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“It’s important to understand the goal of each video or video campaign,” said Hsiao.

“So if a million people are watching it but nobody’s actually buying what you’re trying to sell in the video, then it’s probably not an effective video.” In other words, if viewers are tuning out before the video gets to an important call to action, it matters little if the video had a high view count.

Hsiao’s advice to marketers to avoid being penalized if a platform suddenly switches up the criteria for counting views is to diversify your portfolio, so to speak, not put all your resources into trying to orchestrate one viral video. “More and more of what we’re seeing is companies are literally starting to make videos every day, so there’s less risk.”

He suggests focusing on achieving the calls to action in the video, and frequently creating video that is consistently engaged with by your audience through likes, shares, and comments, which algorithms will respond to more than views alone.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Video Marketing?

“If you’re producing content that you know is genuinely interesting to your audience, then you’ll win in the long-term because consumers will just flock to wherever they’re finding value.”

As for how video metrics will progress in the future, view counts may become moot, with platforms in a battle to gain ground over video, and the mediums in which they display it in a constant state of flux.

“This year we’re literally hearing nonstop about Instagram. We’re even hearing that the feed is going to disappear and it’s all going to move to Stories,” said Hsiao. Stories, incidentally, are counted as a view immediately, as the viewer’s intention by opening them is clear.

Guest Authored By Alexandra MacRae. Alexandra is a freelance writer. Follow Alexandra on Twitter.

Related Article: Creating Successful Social Media Marketing Videos?

"Video as a form of communication will transcend whatever the flavor of the month platform is. So I wouldn’t say there’s any risk in a company being great at video.." -AlexandraMacRae

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Salt Lake City, UT. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

YOUR Social Media Silent Film?

The summer’s hottest destination for video entertainment is a U.K.-based social media brand called LADbible. In July alone, the viral clips that churn out of its Facebook page were viewed more than 3 billion times..

Though the site is nominally branded around young British men, its offerings hold an oddly universal appeal. On a recent afternoon, it served up videos of a guy accidentally hitting himself in the head with a baseball bat; a pizza being made out of French fries; a dog bathing in a Jacuzzi; a woodworker crafting a salad bowl; a tourist riding a slide down the Great Wall of China and a manatee kissing a snorkeler.

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The videos are curated from disparate sources, filmed on smartphones and GoPros around the world, but they all have one thing in common: They’re best watched silently. If they even have sound, it’s completely beside the point.

We are living in the golden age of the silent video. Though we may still pop headphones in to watch a YouTube rant, social media has cultivated its own mute visual culture. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are designed to encourage endless scrolling, and that boosts videos that are made to catch the viewer’s eye without offending her ear with grating bursts of noise.

The clips that spread the furthest online are the ones that can be consumed anywhere without disruption: on the subway, the sidewalk or in the doctor’s office; next to a partner in bed, behind the counter at work or under the desk in class. They’re the ones that allow for private experiences in the most public of places. And in the internet’s global marketplace, they’re the ones that transcend language barriers, instantly legible to viewers in Peoria or Paris.

Related Article: The Social Media Platform For YOUR Brand?

Tubular Labs, the online video analytics company that placed LADbible at the top of its rankings, has found that of videos posted to Facebook by media companies, 46 percent of views go to videos that are completely silent or just accompanied by music. And in practice, an even higher proportion of social videos are watched silently. The advertising agency BBDO Worldwide says that more than 85 percent of its clients’ Facebook videos are viewed with the sound off.

All of that has given rise to a particular kind of video spectacle on social media, one that is able to convey its charms without dialogue, narrative or much additional context. To entertain soundlessly, viral video makers are reanimating some of the same techniques that ruled silent film over 100 years ago.

“For coincidental reasons as much as knowing reasons, we’ve seen a rebirth of a very image-forward mode of communication,” said James Leo Cahill, a professor of cinema studies at the University of Toronto. Among its hallmarks: a focus on spectacle, shocking images and tricks; the capture of unexpected moments in instantly recognizable scenarios; an interplay between text and image; and a spotlight on baby and animal stars.

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The very first short-form cinematic experiments — silent clips that arose even before film evolved into a feature-length narrative form in the early 20th century — have become known as what film scholar Tom Gunning calls the “cinema of attraction,” films that worked by achieving a kind of sensual or physiological effect instead of telling a story.

Created by early filmmakers like the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière and the American inventor Thomas Edison, these early movies took cues from the circus and the vaudeville circuit, featuring performers from that world, and were then played at vaudeville shows. Taken together, they formed what Gunning has called an “illogical succession of performances.”

Social media has created a new kind of variety show, where short, unrelated videos cascade down our feeds one after another. If early films were short by necessity — the earliest reels allowed for just seconds of film — modern videos are pared down to suit our attention spans and data plans. Some viewing habits of social video also recall Edison’s Kinetoscope, one of the earliest film-watching contraptions, which invited single viewers to view short clips through a peephole, offering a voyeuristic look at everything from Annie Oakley shooting to some guy sneezing. Mobile video has again returned us to a cinematic form that’s screened for an audience of one.

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Just as early films made stars out of stage magicians and circus performers, we’ve seen a resurgence of popularity of pure visual spectacle on social video, whether it’s in the studied technological tricks of stunt performers like the modern YouTube magician Zach King or the capture of the spontaneous wonders of nature.

Early filmmakers were also drawn to “the capacity to show the unfolding of irreversible acts, something that could only happen once,” Mr. Cahill said — like a boa constrictor digesting a rabbit. Camera tricks were instantly popularized. The films would take a realist image “and make it magnificent, wondrous and fantastic, literally incredible,” Mr. Cahill said.

Shocking images have ruled since the early days of web video, but social media has accelerated the pace at which we consume them, encouraging the clips that provide instant gratification without the need for aural context. We’ve also seen a cinematic resurgence of the mesmerizing spectacle of physical work: A recent viral video of a guy masterfully painting a disabled parking spot recalls a Lumière film showing workers tearing down a wall.

In the absence of dialogue and involved narratives, early films focused on “actualities,” or setups that would appear instantly recognizable to audiences.

Often, on both social media and in early film, textual clues are provided to viewers outside of the filmed image — in film titles presented to early-20th-century audiences, or in Facebook captions that guide modern viewers. A series of Edison actualities with titles like “What Happened When A Hot Picture Was Taken” and “What Happened In the Tunnel” parallel the modern meme format of pairing a short video with a brief emotional cue: “That feeling when…”

Or consider “What happened on 23rd street in New York City,” which shows a pair of actors, a man and a woman, strolling down the sidewalk when a blows up the woman’s skirt, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of petticoat. You can find modern equivalents of that video everywhere on social media, evidence of actors filming themselves making unexpected moves in crowds of real people. (In both eras, it’s often hard to discern who’s acting and who’s just being.) A recent specimen making the rounds on Facebook, “When The Splits Are Life,” shows a woman appearing in various everyday settings — the grocery store, the street corner, the auto repair shop — and spontaneously breaking into feats of flexibility.

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And just as some early films would use brief intertitles to serve as setups and punch lines to visual jokes — the 1900 stunt film, “How It Feels to be Run Over,” shows a vehicle riding over the camera’s position, followed by the intertitle: “oh! Mother will be pleased” — much of the most popular Facebook videos reimagine the intertitle with big text captions that plug videos into meme formats. According to Tubular Labs, 22 percent of video views on media brands’ Facebook pages take the form of short video clips with prominent captions.

One of the most striking parallels of early silent film and modern social video is the foregrounding of animals and babies.

They make natural silent stars because they are largely speechless; they communicate largely through gesture, movement and expression. But they also suit cinematic forms that are focused on realistic spectacles as opposed to masterful narratives. The old truism — don’t work with children or animals — speaks exactly to why they are the ideal stars of both early actualities and of contemporary Facebook videos. They can’t be tamed, so it seems as if what they are doing is somehow natural and true.

It’s striking that with all of the technological advances that have allowed us to shoot and share video instantly, we’ve returned to some of film’s most original instincts. It wasn’t long after the rise of Kinetoscope, actualities and the cinema of attraction that new technologies upended those early forms, giving way to feature-length narratives, talkies and Technicolor.

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It’s unclear where social video innovation will take the form next, but if anything, modern video is moving in the opposite direction of cinema’s rise: We keep cramming more spectacle and information into smaller and faster bits of entertainment, even discarding whole experiential possibilities — like audio tracks — if they seem to slow it down.

As the online media industry continues along its much-discussed “pivot to video,” we’ll see more and more of our online experiences churned into those hypervisual micro forms, as every inch of screen space gets recast as a flashing billboard. We can expect it all to come faster, brighter and flashier in the future — just maybe not louder.

Guest Authored By Amanda Hess. Amanda is a David Carr Fellow at The New York Times. She writes about internet culture for the Arts section and contributes regularly for the New York Times Magazine. Before she joined The Times in 2016, she wrote for such publications as Slate, the Washington City Paper, ESPN the Magazine, Elle, and Pacific Standard, where her feature on the online harassment of women won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest. She was raised in Wisconsin, Nevada, Washington and Arizona. Follow Amanda on Twitter.

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“As the online media industry continues along its much-discussed “pivot to video,” we’ll see more and more of our online experiences churned into those hypervisual micro forms, as every inch of screen space gets recast as a flashing billboard.

We can expect it all to come faster, brighter and flashier in the future — just maybe not louder..

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Social Media To Magnify YOUR Brand?

Social media has transformed the way businesses, both big and small, interact with consumers..

However, whenever I talk with small-business owners, they’re always skeptical about the impact social media can make for their company. It’s easy to doubt that social media can help your business when you compare yourself to companies like Red Bull, Oreo, or GoPro, but nothing can be further from the truth.

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One of the greatest benefits of social media is that it allows the “little guy” to be just as capable as the industry giant.

So how do you use social media to make your brand seem bigger than it is? Here are a few ways to maximize each platform:

1. Start Using Twitter To Listen

Twitter is one of the most effective platforms when it comes to listening to what other people are saying about your brand or industry. One of the best ways to make your brand seem more prominent on social media is to set up searches on Twitter for certain keywords.

Related Article: Shut-Up And Listen Social Media?

It could be listening to what people are saying about your business on Twitter and engaging or responding to them. It could involve setting up searches for key questions people ask about your line of products and then responding to them. Either way, taking time to listen on Twitter, rather than just talking, is key to maximizing your reach.

2. When Using Facebook, Think Video

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed lately, but it seems like 90 percent of my Facebook newsfeed is videos. This was an intentional move by Facebook.

One of the best ways your small business can increase exposure and reach on Facebook is to create videos. It could be something as simple as a quick 90-second testimonial from one of your clients or a short video from your sales rep answering a common industry question. Whatever kind of content seems to create the most traction, the good news is that Facebook makes it easy to create videos that seem highly-produced.

Related Article: Creating Successful Social Media Marketing Videos?

3. Don’t Forget YouTube

YouTube is a channel most businesses ignore because they don’t have a video team to produce highly-creative and compelling videos. However, YouTube still remains the second-largest search engine behind Google. How do you capitalize on this, as a small business?

Instructional videos about your products, services, or common industry questions are a great way to get noticed. If done well and frequent enough, these videos can create lots of customers who understand your company, which, in turn, shortens the sales process.

Guest Authored By Samantha Owens Pyle. Samantha is the owner and chief strategist of Green Apple Strategy, a Nashville, Tenn.-based marketing and branding firm.

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"One of the greatest benefits of social media is that it allows the “little guy” to be just as capable as the industry giant.."

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

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