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How to Master YouTube Marketing [Video + Slides]

Last month’s Social Media Meetup was “How To Master Online Video Marketing” with SEO expert and blogger Phil Nottingham.

Video is of course very topical, well in fairness it’s been topical for years now. I personally feel that more and more companies are starting to use video as an essential part of their online strategy, not just a nice little add-on.

Phil’s Approach to video

I like the fact that Phil challenges his clients about why they want to do video. For instance, is it better to do a blog post or a video? One rule of thumb is that video is the appropriate form of content when it would lose something if it were just text and image.

Work out the following in this order:

What you want to achieve with your content?
What is the story and the hook?
Who’s your audience?
What is the appropriate form? (This will be clearer at this stage.)
What are the technical implementations?

Once you’ve answered those questions, you can decide on the other details, such as pre-outreach, outreach, and content creation.

Technical video information

Here are a few technical tips to bear in mind when creating and uploading videos:

Always export your videos at full HD (1920 x 1080), YouTube ranks HD videos higher than the rest. Any major editing software can export in HD resolution, even if the video wasn’t originally shot in High Definition.
Export just under 5000kbps.
Include keywords in the filename , title, description, and tags as per traditional SEO.
Include a closed caption (transcript) file and don’t rely on the native YouTube closed caption, especially if your video contains music or noise. Always upload your own, as this is the narrative of what’s going on in the video.
Include a ‘no follow’ link to your video, to increase traffic to your main domain as well as to your YouTube profile.

Other practical YouTube tips

Consolidate your channels: having several YouTube channels isn’t bad practice per se, but it won’t help you with SEO. It’s much harder to see progress if you have your content spread on different platforms. However, if this is your case, feel free to link them to each other.
Associated website: YouTube has recently rolled out a new featured that lets you link your YouTube channel to your own website. This will allow Google to pass traffic to your website via YouTube more easily. This feature is currently available only to partners who enable ads.
Audience Engagement: regularly check the analytics page on your YouTube account to see your audience retention for your videos. This is an indication, for you and for Google, on how well your videos are doing and at what point your viewers engage the most/the least.
“As seen on…” attribution: this feature is very useful if you work in a business. This is a link that leads you to a curated page on YouTube with a list of videos that are related to yours. These videos are not necessarily YOUR videos, and they provide supporting content and context for your viewers.
YouTube 3D: even though the 3D videos on YouTube aren’t really high quality, millions of people watch these videos. It’s worth having a few of these videos to drive traffic as well.
Pre-roll ads: pre-roll ads are relatively cheap and it drives a lot of traffic to that specific video. As the viewer’s count increases, people who stumble across your page will see the number of viewers and it will encourage more organic subscribers. Invest in the YouTube ads systems, whereas they’re pre-roll ones or homepage takeovers.

Here is the video of Phil speaking and below you’ll find his presentation slides as well.

Don’t miss our next meetup, “How To Your Turn Customers Into Brand Ambassadors” with Becky Gloyne on Tuesday 18^th September at The Green Man.

Many thanks to Bernardo Donkor for helping with this post, Bernardo is a blogger at TechLume.

Filed Under: Monthly, Social Media London, Video Tagged With: phil nottingham, youtube

How to Get More Retweets, Shares & Likes [Video]

This month’s Social Media London Meetup was “Sweet Retweets: How to Write for Social Media“ with Sue Keogh (@sookio). Sue is a copywriter and expert in the field of writing for social media.

I met Sue a couple of years ago at a social media conference, she was presenting about how to write effective copy for the internet. We have stayed in touch mainly via Twitter and I finally got her to come and give a talk at Social Media London last month.

Some of her ideas which I think are great:

Don’t be all “me me me”

Use the rule of 3; one third to share interesting and useful information, one third having conversations (questions & answers), and the final third promoting yourself, your company etc. I would even argue you should speak less about yourself but definitely no more than one third.

Don’t be afraid to be brief

Keep your posts short if possible. It’s easy to do long updates on Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn as there are no word limitations. Bear in mind that an increasing number of users are on mobile devices and they appreciate your brevity.

As for Twitter, keep your tweets short if possible so you leave space for others to RT with a comment.

Engage by asking questions and using ‘You’

People love to hear the word ‘you’ as it refers to them, try it yourself. And make sure to ask your followers questions, ask for their opinions on things – most people like to weigh in.

Other strong words which get the attention of readers are ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘how’.

Don’t auto-post between context

A lot of people auto-post across platforms because it’s quick, efficient and very easy to do. Sue argues that it looks a bit lazy to your followers and readers. In addition, by using auto-post you don’t take full advantage of your social media platforms. For instance, on Twitter you might be limited to text, a link and/or a picture, but on Facebook you can make more use of multimedia and write more.

So better to do manual updates if possible, just like how the folks at The Economist do it.

For more details on Sue’s expertise, check out her Sweet Retweets workshops and her interview on this blog: Discover Sookio’s Secrets to Writing for the Web.

Social Media London is a community and monthly meetup featuring expert social media speakers, proudly powered by Link Humans.

Filed Under: Monthly, Social Media, Social Media London Tagged With: Copywriting, keogh, Meetup, Retweets, rts, sookie, sue

How You Can Increase Your Online Influence Score [Video]

At the most recent Social Media London meetup we discussed the hot topic of online influence. I had invited Andrew Grill, CEO of Kred to talk about how influence works and what you can do to boost your own influence online.

I don’t know how important this influence business really is but I do know that most people I deal with know their Klout score and check it very often. Klout is one measurement, Kred is another which Andrew says is more about your influence within a particular niche. Then there’s PeerIndex as well which I don’t use personally.

A few tips that Andrew lists for you to increase your influence:

Find what you’re influential in, this is likely to be your professional field and/or niche. If it’s not – maybe you should change careers!
Give people recommendations and endorsements whenever possible, this will lead to increased reciprocal influence.
Focus on your main area(s) of interest, try to narrow it down to 2-3 things you want to be known for. This can be tough I know and can take a while but it will make you look more focused ‘in real life’ as well.
Offer something of value to your target audience, try writing a blog, publishing a podcast, create videos or if you are up for the challenge try your hand a writing a book.
Keep being authentic by mixing in ‘human’ updates, nobody wants to read a boring feed of industry updates without any human touch – don’t be a robot online please.
Be interesting, have an opinion, don’t just repeat what others say. A sure-fire way to get noticed is to have a strong opinion on a topic, firmly putting your foot down on one side of an argument. Not everyone will agree but everyone will respect you for not playing it safe.

And do try out Kred as well, it’s a little different to Klout and more advanced. And like Klout it doesn’t get everything right, apparently I’m influential in social media, recruitment and wine. I didn’t think drinking a glass of wine every now and then would qualify me as a influencer online!

Here’s the video I shot on the night, see what you think.

Social Media London is a community and monthly meetup featuring expert social media speakers, proudly powered by Link Humans. Thanks to Ben Donkor for his contribution to this post.

Filed Under: Monthly, Social Media, Social Media London, Video Tagged With: Influence