This year, social media marketing is all about content — and that’s where video comes in. Internet video is a great way to generate wider brand awareness or to increase traffic to your website, and social media websites provide a truly unmatchable marketing resource.
So, how can you use video to improve your social media marketing? Here are some top tips for the most popular social media platforms.
Andy Havard is a marketing executive at Skeleton Productions, a U.K. corporate video production company. (read more…)
While everyone loves video, there’s not a huge demand for perfect video. For Kaiser Permanente, this love of video content offered a great opportunity to show off the stories traditional advertising couldn’t tell and give people a great reason to check them out. So the company started a video blog.
In his presentation at SocialMedia.org‘s BlogWell conference in Los Angeles, Kaiser Permanente’s director of digital media and syndication, Vince Golla, talked about how the company brought its fans’ genuine, unscripted stories to a bigger audience without hiring an expensive production company.
Some key takeaways from his presentation:
- You can’t sample health care. Kaiser Permanente needed to show people in compelling, honest ways reasons customers love the brand. So the company turned to video testimonials and spotlighting the people who make it great: its staff.
- Your videos don’t have to be perfect. Golla says to keep the video blog sustainable, the company had to pull production off on its own.
The interesting thing about new marketing opportunities is how quickly brands will jump into the fray without really understanding how a tool really works and how to best utilize it. Take social media, for example — as it grew and pulled in more audiences, brands of all sizes raced to launch their social media campaigns, often with horrific results.
Does anybody remember the Pepsi Refresh Project? Don’t worry if you don’t — even with tens of millions spent on it, few people know that it ever even existed. In short, it was a strategy that was supposed to change how brands used social media forever but ended up just being another example of how even the most savvy marketers often misread a new landscape and miss the mark with their audiences.
Today’s online video environment is no different. As viewership is increasing significantly and steadily, marketers anxious to get in front of these viewers are racing to add video advertising to their marketing arsenal. (read more…)
Autodesk makes 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. With more than 80 products used by more than 10 million people around the globe, the company’s customers make stuff the rest of us use and experience every day.
With its flagship AutoCAD product, the company’s target is to reach 18- to 24-year-old designers — the heavy users of Facebook. To connect with them, Autodesk is doing all the usual stuff involved in creating a great Facebook page, but it is also experimenting with new techniques to make the page even better — such as live streaming.
At our BlogWell conference, Autodesk’s Daniel Zucker and Marielle Covington took the stage to teach us how the company is implementing live streaming on Facebook and how so far it’s generated 167,000 fans.
A few of their big ideas:
- Build up to your live-streaming event. For one of its big “Facecast” events, Autodesk created polls, fill-in-the-blank posts and art contents through multiple social channels for six weeks.
Google+ has many great features besides adding your friends to circles. The network’s video chat tool, Google+ Hangouts, has awesome audio and video quality. If you’re curious about the tool but not sure how to get started, the points below will help you be successful when you’re video chatting with others on Google+.
Have a moderator. I would suggest that someone moderates your Google+ Hangout. When someone is speaking, their video box will be enlarged and be brought to the top of the Hangout window. When we are speaking to other people and our conversations take off, we tend to jump in and not wait for someone to finish speaking. This can cause chaos in your Hangout. Having a moderator to ask questions from certain attendees will help keep everything flowing smoothly.
Know your players. While you can invite as many people as you want to join a Hangout, you can’t have more than 10 people in a Hangout at once. (read more…)
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