Socialized Business Strategy: Facebook Video Marketing & Video on Twitter

Here's an interesting new article from ReelSEO's daily postings, this one a nice primer on using video with Facebook. Click here to read the full article.

If you're not already aware, Facebook can store more then just photos; it can be a great way to share your company's video material with fans and friends.

Some of their key recommendations for Facebook video:

1. Have a Facebook Page landing page video
2. Do a follow-up video to new “Fans”
3. Find the people who are most likely to “share” your video
4. Harness YouTube social sharing functionality for Facebook

For the first point, Grant Cowell writes (in his interview with social media expert Brian Solis):

A) Add a Customized Tab and Intro Video to Your Facebook Page

“A lot of companies will design a series of interesting initiatives where the landing page isn’t the wall.” Says Brian. “The landing page is a customized tab, which can be done very inexpensively and effectively.” Some people introduce some exclusive content there, some specials, some promotions, or some interesting or entertaining videos just to start to navigate that experience.”

Similar good advice comes from their companion piece about video on Twitter, written by Grant Cowell (with an interview with TwitJump's Alex Lawrence)  here :

#1: Think “TV SEO” (Twitter Video Search Engine Optimization)

Search engines are connecting video as a highly ranking component for organic search results, and often video is a very ‘real time’ search result – which is what the search engines value greatly.

“Well, video in search results is often of live events, a recent string events, or recently recorded events – so it’s started to contribute to quick results in improving search engine rankings particularly as it pertains to Google (which is two-thirds of the search market today),” says Alex. “So if you’re able to post the video along with your tweet, then Google is also showing a liking for tweets as a potential search as well. So with video and twitter, you’re kind of ‘doubling down’ on your visibility in the search engines with twitter video – with real time update through the tweet, as well as real time content through video. People who tweet are simply pulling in things that are hyper-recent (which is what Google and other search engines want); they’re not pulling in things that are old.”
 

#2: Use Twitter Video For Your Real-Time News

I asked Alex to share an actual example of how twitter video is beating the competition: traditional search engines and traditional video (television). Here was his response:

“Recently there was fire that broke out here near Utah (where I live), at an army machine gun facility. The fire burned over 20 thousand acres, and they evacuated maybe 1,700 homes. It lit up the Utah skyline. You could see the fire from everywhere, but you couldn’t see local television news coverage of what was happening. So people were taking video with their cell phones, and they were attaching that video to their tweets. Then the local news stations were actually picking up people’s twitter feeds and using those videos as part of the community updates (or visual updates).

“It was really interesting to me to watch all that happen in real time, whereas maybe even a year ago you wouldn’t have gone to twitter for the real time updates. Before this, you would have had to have gone to a local news station or maybe to Google itself and try and search for data that was probably several hours old. But now with the new twitter, you get real time video that is both very interesting and timely. You get multiple videos in real time from different local perspectives – local videos coming in all over twitter, different fires, different houses burning, and evacuation of animals – all kinds of things that were happening.”
 

#3: Create Micro-Videos For Twitter (i.e., Keep ‘em short!)

Twitter is about micro-blogging – getting your message out quickly and limiting you to short posts. If you expect people to watch your embedded video on their twitter page, then you need to treat your video with the same brevity and get your message out quickly," says Alex. “Condense the message!”

Alex strongly recommends building short video content that’s customized for twitter, and cautions against being lazy by instead taking clippings of longer videos.

“Good video content for twitter is about making it a compact length and file size, but having it stand out as a quality piece in itself,” he says. “A lot of people have made the mistake in taking video content that wasn’t designed for shorter snippets and shorter clips; they go ahead and cut out a portion of it, and then add it to a tweet; and it doesn’t have the results they desire, ” says Alex. “If you’re going to build a meaningful twitter following and you count on using video content to share with them, you should create content that is specifically designed for twitter.” His advice: Create some videos specifically designed for your twitter audience, and see how they respond to it.
 

#4 – Resist The Temptation of Becoming “Television Chatter” On Twitter

No matter how big your business is, your relationship to video, or how much you want to spread the word through twitter, Alex cautions you to resist the temptation of using your twitter account to constantly push video out to your followers.

“You’ve got to switch to articles, you’ve got to retweet information that you’re seeing in your space, you’ve got to engage in conversation throughout, the people your following as well as people that are following you,” says Alex.

I asked Alex, what’s a “best practice” for how often you can get away with video in twitter?

“I think best practices there’s a lot of different people that will say x is best practice, but I’ve heard anywhere from 1 to 3 videos a day out of 12 tweets a day is probably pushing the envelope,” he says.