Promote your videos by hand

After watching an amazing video that a client had prepared for their business, I asked how she was going to promote it. She said she already had it set to get blasted out to all of the social networks and posted on all of the video sites. I buried my head in my hands.

There’s a big difference between automated video promotion and manual promotion. For those creating massive numbers of videos of items such as inventory, it makes sense to automate the bulk. When it comes to high-quality videos that took time to create, it should be done by hand. Here’s how:

Start with YouTube

Some would say that it’s best to put videos on proprietary players or other video sites like Vimeo. For the most exposure possible, it’s best to start with YouTube. Get it up there. Do the right research and craft the title, description, and tags appropriately. Make it the best possible YouTube video you can.

After it’s up and running on YouTube, wait a day or two before uploading it to other sites or other venues (including Facebook). The more plays and likes a YouTube video gets, the more visible it will be in the important places such as YouTube search and on the search engines themselves. Focus all efforts on the original upload first.

Blast it on social

There are two phases to this part. First, get it out on Facebook, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest. If it’s a truly important video that has some social sharing legs to it (i.e., not an ad for your store), invest in getting it exposed.

Once it’s up on the important networks, set your calendar or put it in your social scheduling tools to post again in the future – a month or so is fine – as long as it’s something that’s not too timely.

Blog about it

This isn’t just a matter of getting it out there on a stand-alone blog post with a quick caption. If it’s an important video, talk about it. Write a story surrounding it. Encourage your readers to watch AND share it.

The blog post can then be promoted a week or so later on the social media sites similar to how you promoted it as a direct video in the first place.

Upload it

You should already have it out on the other video sites and possibly on your website’s internal video player. Now, it’s time to get it uploaded directly to Facebook. Don’t spam it – if you posted it to Facebook from YouTube one week then followed up the next week by promoting your blog post, wait another week before uploading it to Facebook.

There’s nothing wrong with repeating a message, but do it in a way that doesn’t seem spammy. When you upload it to Facebook, don’t do it with the same exact title and description that you put on YouTube or in your blog post.

Rinse, repeat

Unless it’s a timely video, you can do the same thing (other than re-uploading it to the video sites) a month or more later. You can even write a brand new blog post about it. Get it out on Tumblr. Refer to it in other discussions or blog posts that aren’t centering around the video itself.

Video promotions are best done manually if you want to maximize the exposure. It takes more time but it can yield exponentially more views if you do it right and have a solid video to promote.

Here’s an infographic that discusses video tactics even further: