POSTING AND MEASURING PERFORMANCE
This is the third and final installment of our blog series on video for social media. As in the previous blogs in this series I’m joined by Jennifer Radke, CEO of the National Institute for Social Media (NISM). Jennifer’s organization helps social media managers develop the skills and knowledge necessary for success in social media marketing.
In this installment, we’ll cover the final steps in the process of posting your videos online, positioning them properly and measuring their success.
CONTEXT
Context frames your content so your audience understands what they’re about to view, read or listen to. It gives them a reason to watch the video and properly positions the content in the mind of the viewer. The platform itself provides some context, your channel provides some context too, but videos need accurate, detailed descriptions, good titles, tags, and other context to be found by search engines and provide much needed context.
POST FREQUENCY
Post videos about 1-2 times per week, then recycle older videos about once every 2-3 months. Mix up the new videos with the old. Be sure to use a social media calendar to track your posts and schedule them.
Jennifer: “At NISM, we help clients understand how to create a strategy and then implement and maintain it. But there are a lot of different tools they could use along the way to keep track of their content. It could be something as simple as using a Word or Excel document that puts all of these pieces, goals, individual measurements and outcomes into one place, or it's something more robust, like a specific project management software that they can share with others.Each of these pieces of the strategy should have delegated owner with responsibility, timelines, and follow-up. What happened as a result?”
PLATFORM SPECIFIC TIPS
Post all videos directly (native) to each platform. Doing this will also keep your audience on your social media channel instead of them getting distracted by cat videos on YouTube. Research each channel you plan to use, because they all have very different requirements, formats and options.
STREAMING TIPS
In addition to uploading direct to each platform independently, create a company YouTube channel to host all videos. You can break them down and create playlists for different types of videos. In addition to YouTube, you could use a paid video marketing platform like Wistia if you want more control over the call to action at the end of the video.
SUBTITLES
Many viewers watch social media videos without sound. Plus there are many viewers with disabilities. For these reasons, all videos for social media should include subtitles. Quality subtitles and captions are inexpensive through companies like rev.com. The resulting .srt file can easily be uploaded when you post the video, giving the viewer the option for captions when they click the “CC” button. Foreign language subtitles can be created this way as well. You can get captions generated automatically from YouTube, but you’ll need to make corrections.
MONITOR YOUR RESULTS
Most platforms and all streaming services provide data on how your video is performing. You can tell the number of views, how long people watched and often where they clicked off. This data can show you what’s working and help inform your future video making decisions.
For more on developing video content in general, check out our blog: Tips and Tools for Developing Video Content.
Mastcom (mastcom.com) is here to help you build your video asset library and give your videos style, purpose and direction. For help with social media management, follow the National Institute for Social Media on social media (NISM).
