How?
“Why?” is the best question anyone can ask, but “How?” is the second best. “Why?” gives us the basis of true understanding, but “How?” gives us the practical application of that understanding. So today I want to take a look at how we now use the videos we have been making using the ideas I discussed in my previous articles (paradigm change in business video & making business videos).
[bctt tweet=”You make cool business videos, but how and where do you use them?” username=”yellbusiness”]
First, we need to understand what the purpose of our videos is. The purpose of advertising, all advertising, is to attract more customers. They can do that by making people aware that a product or business exists. Making people believe that one particular business is their kind of business, will build loyalty. Demonstrating the superiority of a product or service elevates one business over the competition. Telling a good story creates a following of returning viewers who will feel loyalty and believe in your superior service. Creating a relationship with customers has become a reality since the advent of social media, and combines the storytelling with demonstration and awareness building of previous forms with genuine interaction.
So we make our responsive videos that tell stories one day, and demonstrate products/services the next, but how are we to use them?
Customer Viewing
Once again, we need to know where our customers are. What social media platform are they using and why? Do they change platforms for different occasions or uses? What is the prime viewing habit of our customers? Do they then have niche platforms that they use? How do these correspond to our business?
Ok, so that’s a bunch of questions! How about we get some answers? Here are some statistics from Sproutsocial.
What we can see is that Facebook is universally popular. The reach it has by age, location and sex is massive. This is also true if you consider income. What may be more useful to know is that as we look at the next most popular networks we see a marked change in the demographics. Twitter is skewed towards the young in terms of its viewership, but Instagram is even more skewed with almost twice as many 18-29-year-olds as 30-49-year-olds using the platform. Instagram is also much more popular with women. Now we can begin to see where we may want to start posting our videos if we know who our customers are. This kind of data is available for all networks for free. If you are willing to pay the level of information available is astonishing, but even the free stuff is really useful.
What Type Of Video Do We Have?
Once we can see where to find out customers, we need to think about what they do on each of those platforms and what we are doing with our video. We need to match the mood and activity of the customer to have the most impact. Let’s look at a couple of examples. For live streaming of video, we want to go with Facebook. It has the highest usage across all categories so will give us the best reach and the greatest number of interactions. The key to success with a live stream is the number of interactions we can get. The immediacy of the responses between us and the customer can be a big boost when we are audience building and demonstrating a product.
If, however, we are building our reputation as an expert then Youtube is the obvious choice. Youtube is the second biggest search engine in the world and the first stop whenever people are looking to learn new skills. Our “How To” videos are a way of showing our skills and helping customers while letting them know that when they can’t do something, we can. That doesn’t mean that our videos have to be segregated between platforms all of the time.
Cross-Platform Sharing
I’ll bet you’ve stopped to watch a demonstration or “How To” video on Facebook. You’ll have stopped to watch if it was especially entertaining or eye-catching. That casual interest can work for us, it just won’t be the main source of views for those types of video. But we want to strive to get as much of ourselves out there as possible, so we get views where we can. The trick is to cross-share the best and target the more specific. What is our product? Who wants or needs to see this? Pick your social media accordingly but when you make something really cool… show everyone!
