5 Reasons Why The Ellen Tweet Worked (and 1 Key Question)

When Ellen took to a captive live TV audience of millions last night, took a “selfie” with 11 of Hollywood’s hottest celebrities, and put out a call to become the most tweeted tweet ever, not surprisingly, the world listened. The tweet, which at time of writing has more than 2.6 million retweets, (more than 3 times the previous record, Barack Obama’s first tweet after being re-elected for his second term)

But why did this work? How did it “beat” agency newsrooms filled with thousands of social media professionals, paid millions of dollars to create the next “Oreo cookie” or “Pharrell’s Hat”? And what does it really mean for the future of social media marketing?

Far be it from me to take a pedestal spot and claim I know all and see all, and speak for everyone, I did want to offer a few observations in convenient list format. So, here we go.

1. The tweet represented the end an era of social media marketing.

It represented the end to a lot of thinking about what’s truly possible in social media marketing by setting the bar so high for future content that it is literally impossible for anyone else to catch up. Previous “branded viral tweet” stalwart, “You can dunk in the dark” produced by Oreo and 360i and the arguable inventor of the “real-time marketing” era of social media got about 15,000 retweets, or 1/173rd the total of the Ellen tweet. The problem is that every brand now wants success, because it is indeed “possible”. Few realize the amount of work, timing, and, well, money that went into making this one iconic moment (and I’m sure we’ll read about that exact effort in the trade press in the next few days). It now either requires brands to level set with their strategy to something more realistic, or open up and pour out their pocket books to emulate the same success.

2. The tweet was about the photo, and not the brand.

While, to the more trained eye, it was pretty obvious that Ellen was taking the selfie on a Samsung, well, thing (I’m still not sure which device it was, and I *own* a Galaxy S4) it wasn’t obvious in the photo that it was a Samsung device. Why does this matter? Because people don’t typically like to share blatant advertising. The creative itself, is the non threatening shot of a group of celebrities that most people like or admire at least one of, in a moment that is at once both unexpected and unique. It’s no less harmless to the average user than any other photo. And this is a big reason why it spread more quickly. No “catch”. No “gotchas”. No public shaming for most who shared this photo. And as Kasey Scala pointed out, most people probably don’t even care that it was Samsung. Samsung’s agency left it to the trade press to figure out their involvement, well, in addition to a little “humblebragging”:

3. The tweet was sent to an already huge Twitter audience that just grew bigger as the buzz did.

Ellen started the night with more than 25 million Twitter followers already, putting her in the top 15 worldwide anyway. This ensures that anything that plays to her audience would have done decently well, regardless of the circumstances. Amazingly, her account grew 1.5 million followers (hat tip to Eli Langer for that stat) in the day of and after the Oscars telecast giving her an even bigger audience to work with again.

4. Ellen has an audience that appeals to a broad demographic.

Twitter has had trouble with growing, and reaching a mainstream audience, which has become more obvious since Twitter’s IPO last year. But in terms of audience that Twitter wants to reach and grow to, there’s really no better way to introduce Twitter to than to do it with Ellen DeGeneres, who can be an excellent guide to continually explain the product and how it works during her show. This education, of course, starts with getting people started with a simple example — retweeting and sharing a photo of celebrities that they love.

5. The call to action was simple but still required TV to execute the moment.

As many folks in digital like to say, TV is over. But it’s not. TV is still remarkably big. The key with execution is recognizing that a live, captive audience really only exists for in two primary cases:

• Major sports events
• Major award shows

The inventory for these moments is now limited, as we live in a DVR and instant streaming society. The Oscars telecast represents as least as much if not more of a general audience than the Super Bowl (and considerably cheaper to buy as well.). But Samsung likely had to buy advertising on the Twitter end as well (imagine launching a server-crippling campaign on national TV without their support? Not likely). This is where the innovation is, and likely a point that will sit in Twitter sales pitches for the rest of time. Twitter makes engagement from live TV truly possible at amazing scale.
The key question, of course, is whether or not Samsung’s investment in the greatest “selfie” ever taken results in additional purchases of Samsung products. Or does it even matter? That’s up to them to decide.
Either way Samsung’s integration has clearly created a new case study in social media marketing. But, it’s just a matter of time before the next major brands tries to capture lightning in a bottle again.

2013's Top Memes and Viral Videos

So 2013 a lot has happened online and offline, we've got a new Pope after Pope Benedict retired for the first time ever. But 2013 surely will be known as the year that marketeers didn't fill the pockets of the television execs but instead invested heavily in online advertising and had much success. Finally cracking the internet and getting videos shared and viewed across the world. Some people will question the ethics of this but what ever happens we had a lot of laughs on the way.

January Duke Street Hazard

Slipping over can be a painful and embarrassing thing to happen to us, however in January 2013 of this year a street in Norwich became an overnight hit. With the recent bad weather and the pavements being very icy, you'd be foolish not to try and record the outcome. Hence forth the Duke Street Hazard arrived. An 8 minute long video with a catchy dance number added to it has got over a million views. I'm sure it created a lot of laughter at many offices up and down the country.

February The Harlem Shake Arrived!

Cam from the land down under with 4 friends just mucking around and at its peak had 4,000 different versions of the craze being uploaded to YouTube every day. Although The Harlem Shake wasn't just a viral hit it changed the future of music. With the US chart company Billboard counting YouTube popularity in its listings. The song itself was a true viral hit with the original inspiring others to re create their own.

March The Lad Bomb

Invented by Chris Stark and his friends is a drink which is one part Jager the other being double vodka red bull. However this wasn't the viral hit. Christ from Radio 1 was sent down to go interview Mila Kunis about her latest film. This being Chris's very first interview with such a big star he is terribly nervous. But what results is something amazing Chris goes completely off topic giving Mila an insight into his laddish lifestyle and invites Mila to come watch the football with him and eat some chicken. It was like an awkward scene of someone trying to chat a women up at the bar but in this case was supposed to be an interview. But Mila found this hilarious and didn't want to talk about her film she wanted to learn more of the Lad Bomb and Sir Dosser. This is probably going to be the only time you see genuine interaction from a Hollywood superstar.

April The Biggest hit of the year

Not even David Attenborough could describe what is going on in this video but with over 90 million views and still counting 'how animals eat their food' is the hit of the year. Two friends some cardboard boxes cheap outfits and some plastic plates have created an amazingly funny video which has been shared across the whole world for everyone to enjoy and shows you don't have to spend a lot of money to make something go viral.

May The Social Media Savvy Astronaut 

Chris Hadfield was given this name by Forbes. but by tweeting and showing the world what his work was like working on the international space station is one way to get your name remembered by millions. But as a final sign off he sang David Bowie's Space Oddity from the station itself surely the first of a long line of music videos to appear from space. But heres to you Chris Hadfield for starting the trend.

June The Posh Burger

Chancellor George Osborne was working late one night preparing a speech and decided to order in a burger for himself to eat while working away at his tasks. While this was happening one of his aides took a snap and posted it to Twitter. This led to a huge backlash against Osborne as many people suggested this was a posh burger nothing of the greasy kind you would get a normal person eating after hours. This wasn't the end of the politicians plight into pictures of themselves while eating at their desk. Eric Pickles is a larger member of parliament, he brought many laughs on twitter when he tweeted himself eating a salad only a few days after the whole Osborne affair. Many people condemned this also has sly PR work as many people didn't believe Mr Pickles would be eating a salad.

July Sharknado

The picture says it all really. Sharknado, that's a compound word of shark and tornado - fit neatly into the "so bad, it's good" category of straight-to-TV movie. It was so popular though that a sequel was commissioned and fans on twitter were able to choose the name.

August Enter Twerking 

In August Miley Cyrus well and truly left her old image of Disney's Hannah Montana behind after her performance at the MTV VMA awards with Robin Thicke.

Enter a big foam hand a scantily dressed Miley Cyrus and Twerking became popular leaving most of the world with the mouths wide open over what they had just seen. But for Miley this was just the start and had everyone across the internet talking about her.

September Twerking Fail

This unfortunate video appeared in September of a girl trying to twerk upside down against a shut door but her friend opens the door sending her body crashing into the table and setting her legs on fire, where the video abruptly cuts. However, many people have asked whether the video had been faked after the girl in the video was interviewed on television.

October The Fearless Rabbit

In a lifetime certain things will happen and you'll look back and tell your friends such an unbelievable story that they would never believe and your left saying you should have been there to see it. Well thanks to YouTube now this has all changed you can capture even the strangest events.

This fearless rabbit chased and ran along side a van in Scotland in the dead of night not showing any fear from the fact it could be killed instantly. This video goes on for 5 minutes and brings these unbelievable stories to life.

November Serge the Party Llama 

When you go down to your local and think of things that your going to see that night. A Llama doesn't come to mind but a group of friends in France made this possible taking Serge on a night out with them. They were live tweeting his every movements of the night and also was pictured across several hundred twitter accounts.

December How to lose your job in 30 minutes

The final star of 2013 is Justine Sacco who literally lost her job in 30 minutes.

Justine a PR executive in the US had just boarded a plane to South Africa. By the time she had landed, she had lost her job, following a worldwide wave of criticism and a hashtag #hasjustinelandedyet - that trended around the world. Its fair to say that Justine has apologised and hopefully 2014 will be a better year for herself.

Free Tools to Track the Secrets of Social Shares

One of the key features of the modern semantic web is the social sharing of content. This takes various forms such as likes, plus ones, shares, social bookmarking and commenting. Sharing is a form of organic link building and just as links from authoritative sites are more important than others, so some shares are much more significant than others.

In this article I look at how you can use free tools to track who shares content and on what platforms. I also look at how you can identify key infuencers and review their behaviours and networks. Social analytics is a growing area and there are many paid for social tracking tools but there is also a lot you can do with the free tools that track social activity on Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. I have covered some of my favourites such as Topsy, Allmyplus and Tweriod in this article.

Social Sharing Is More Complex Than Good Titles And Quality Content

Understanding the nature of social networks and sharing is a key responsibility of those responsible for creating and distributing content. Some argue that if you just focus on producing quality content and a compelling title it will be found and shared. At one level this is true but even the same piece of content with the same title, however good or bad, can perform very differently depending upon how it is shared. Below are three examples of my own posts and how they were shared across different networks.

In the first example the content performed much better on Google+. It might seem obvious that it would get more shares on Google+ than on other platforms given the content. However, that was not the case with the second article on LinkedIn, where the article received twice as many tweets as shares on LinkedIn. You might argue sharing on LinkedIn is always lower but this is not the case as we can see with the third article. In this case there were twice as many LinkedIn shares as Tweets and the article was ignored on Google+.

In the rest of this article I will explore how you can use free tools to track shares and build a picture of influencers and networks on the different platforms. Along the way I will use the three articles above as examples so we can see how they were shared and who the key influencers and networks were.

Tracking The Number Of Shares

On sites such as Social Media Today you can see at the top of the article how many times the post has been shared on the various platforms. Thus you get an initial indication as to how popular the article is and whether it is being shared more on LinkedIn or say Twitter. You can then explore who is sharing and the networks they are in.

However, not all web pages have share counters so you can’t see immediately how content has been shared. For example, you might be interested in a competitor’s content and who shares their content but they may not have visible share counters on their site. The good news is you can easily see how many times a page has been shared on social media platforms by using Shared Count.

You can paste any url into Shared Count and it will show you how the article has been shared across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Pinterest. Thus you can get the raw data on social shares for any web page.

Tracking Shares, Networks And Influencers On Twitter

Twitter has a nice search feature where you can search for the url of a content article and it will return all the recent tweets that contained the url including shortened links. Thus you can get a quick picture of who shared the article, however, it tends to only return the most recent tweets. As an example a search for my Google+ article url only produced three recent tweets.

You can also undertake an advanced search with Twitter for key words, exact phrases, accounts and even choose positive or negative sentiment tweets.

Taking Things Further With Topsy

You can take your investigations much further using Topsy’s free social search which has a wider range of advanced options. Topsy also produces more comprehensive results, for example, a search for my Google+ article url on Topsy came up with 676 tweets. It also identified 55 tweets by influencers. You can look at all tweets or just the influencer tweets as shown below. Not surprisingly Social Media Today was one of the top influencers for this article.

On Topsy you can find influencers on a specific topic simply by searching for it. However, you may already have your own ideas on key influencers from your research. Topsy allows you to explore the details of an influencer’s tweets in great detail. You can find every tweet by a person on a specific topic through a Topsy search. You just use “from:@username topic” in your search. You can also filter this for specific date ranges.

You can also track all conversations between a person and others by using “from@username @username”. Thus you can track all conversations between two influencers.

You can also track every tweet a person made which included a link to a specific site such as your own, to see what they are saying about you or another company. In the example below I searched for my own tweets that contained links to the Social Media Today site. You can see there were 11 tweets and they had a positive sentiment.

I haven’t time to explore all of Topsy’s features here, for more see my article on Topsy and Twitter Social Analytics.

Tracking When People Share Content

The timing of postings is known to be important when it comes to sharing. AddThis published an infographic based on five years of data on sharing from over 1 billion users. They found that most shares happened on a Wednesday and more specifically at 9.30am. Based on this Eloqua recommended posting your best content on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings to achieve maximum sharing.

The difficulty with this advice is that if you have an audience across multiple time zones then 9.30am for one person might be 5.30am for someone else. You need to know when your audience is online and more importantly when your influencers or the people are most likely to share your content. This is important as the AddThis survey found that 75% of all clicks take place on the same day the content is first published and over 50% within two minutes of being published.

With Tweriod you can track not only when your followers are online but when they mention or retweet you. For example, according to Tweriod most of my followers are online between 11am and 10pm on a weekday and the number peaks at 5pm UK. However, the people that mention and retweet me tend to so either at 8-9am UK or 1-2pm UK as can be seen from the following Tweriod analysis:

Thus if I tweet at 5pm when most of my audience is online I will miss the two periods when people are most likely to retweet me.

I think this analysis provides extra backing for the AddThis conclusion that people are most likely to share early in the day as the two peaks represent early morning in the UK and early morning in the US.

Tracking Shares, Networks And Influencers On Google+

Tracking on the Google+ network is much easier than on other platforms.

In a previous SMT post I set out how easy it is to track engagement on Google+ for a specific web page. You just type the url into the Google+ search box and you will get a page showing every post containing that url. Unlike with Twitter, you will need to search separately for shortened urls.

Once you have your list of posts you can quickly see which people had the most influence by seeing which posts received the most plus ones, comments and reshares. In the case of my Google+ article it was a post by Charise Stanberg which received 473 plus ones and over 200 reshares. This one post accounted for nearly 20% of all plus ones on the article.

By clicking on the bottom right of the post (where the pictures are) it will show you who gave the plus ones and who reshared. Thus you start to get a feel for the social networks at work.

Google+ makes it even easier to map these networks through Google Ripples. By clicking the top right of the post I can view Ripples which is a visual representation of engagement activity on the post over time. This can provide a useful overview of the nature of specific social networks, see the image below for the network that shared the post by Charise.

 

Tracking Google+ Influencers

If you want to find out more about a particular influencer on Google+ you can use Allmyplus.com. This is a great tool which allows you to search for a specific subject, post or an individual. There is so much you can do with Allmyplus but for the sake of brevity I am just going to focus on influencer tracking here.

If you are interested in specific influencers you can search by their Google+ id number or name, the id number or name is in the top of the url on their profile page. With Allmyplus you can see a huge amount of data about them.

You can see how many plus ones, comments and reshares their original posts and reshares receive. See an example of the type of data for an influencer below, I have left their name out for the purposes of this article.

You can also download this data as a CSV file including the list of people that reshared content. 

You can also see when they share and reshare by day of the week and hours of the day. You even get a graph showing this (blue is original posts, red is reshares) for your own time zone. Below is a graph for a US influencer showing that they don’t come online until 10am my time and they are most likely to reshare content at 1pm my time.

You can combine the tools for example you can identify their most popular post using Allmyplus and then use Ripples on this post to analyse their networks in more depth.

Tracking Shares, Networks and Influencers On LinkedIn

I have found this to be the most difficult network to track the sharing of content with free tools.

LinkedIn has recently provided a nice feature that will allow you to see who many people viewed your own posts, who liked the post and who has commented. It also groups these into conversations such as a community discussion. You can click to see the discussion and you can also click on the orange and green dots to see the people that liked or commented. 

This is a very nice feature for tracking your own posts but I haven’t yet found a way to find all such LinkedIn data in relation to a specific piece of content.

You can look at the groups where a content article is most likely to be shared and search specific groups for key words. See an example below.

Whilst I have had some success with searching groups it is not an easy process.

There is an advanced search with the paid edition of LinkedIn but I am not sure it provides much more advanced functionality in terms of tracking interaction with content. However, it does provide a lot more advanced people searching features.

So this is where you come in. Have you found good ways of tracking content shares and influencers on LinkedIn? Also what tools are you using that I have missed here?

Unruly Reveals The Science Behind Viral Video Sharing

Last week, online video technology consultants Unruly released “The Science of Sharing”, a white paper describing the best practices companies should observe when creating sharable viral videos. The white paper was released a couple of days after YouTube announced that they were making channel management easier.

To research and write the white paper, Unruly analysed statistical data gathered using Unruly ShareRank™, the company’s patented online video ranking software, based on views, shares and engagement. According to the white paper, which you can apply to have emailed to your inbox:

[ShareRank] is powered by a proprietary algorithm containing 100+ variables, trained from a data set of over 329 billion video views and 10,000+ consumer responses to predict the social impact of video content. 

Unruly measured the impact of 12 different commercials which were televised during Super Bowl XLVII and released online. To work out why each video was or was not successful, Unruly rated each on its content and the emotional response it evoked in the audience. The success of each advert was dependent on how often it was shared on social media networks.

Each video was marked on the strength of the psychological response it elicited in the viewer, as well as the strength of its social motivation: why people would want to share the video and how likely this was to happen. The two scorecards below, both from the white paper, show the exact categories considered and the scale to which videos could be considered sharable:



The two adverts which scored the highest, Budweiser’s “Brotherhood” and Ram’s “Farmer”, evoked strong emotional responses of warmth and happiness in the audience, who were motivated into sharing the video to spread this emotional experience and to get a reaction.

”Brotherhood” was the most successful ad overall, achieving an Unruly ShareRank
score of 7.9 and an impressive share rate of 18.6%. “Farmer” came second, with a ShareRank score of 7.3.

In the white paper’s conclusion, Unruly draws attention to the fact that neither of the top ranked videos used humour to elicit a response, setting them apart from the majority of the Super Bowl commercials. Citing the data gathered during the study, Unruly advises companies to avoid humour as an emotional response, if possible, in order to “stand out”:

Hilarity is a fickle trigger – brands need to be exceptionally funny, or their content falls flat. We recommend brands move away from humor for future media events in order to be remembered and shared.

Viewers, Unruly says, need to feel an extremely strong, positive emotional response from a video if they are then going to share it with their friends. Videos which evoke emotions on the stronger end of the scale are three times more likely to be shared than videos that evoke weaker responses.

In other viral video news, YouTube has made channel management much easier, making it possible for users managing multiple channels using a Google+ account to create new ones from the same account.

In an announcement last week, Staff Software Engineer Brett Hobbs encouraged channel managers to take advantage of the new, useful feature. Of course, the feature won’t only benefit users: YouTube channel managers who haven’t got a Google+ account will create one, increasing the social networks membership figures.

Do you agree with the findings of Unruly’s white paper? What do you think makes videos more sharable?       

20 Video Ideas For Your Business’ YouTube Channel

So, you have set up your business’ YouTube channel and you’re ready to start uploading videos but, frustratingly, you have no idea what to post. Here are a few ideas of different videos you could post to engage with potential customers and clients, while also raising brand awareness. If you haven’t created your YouTube channel yet, I advise you read my post on Social Media Today first.

1. Events

Record the events you hold and post the videos on YouTube. If you have footage from previous events you have held, post them as well.

If you attend any events, record what happens and post it on your channel. Post videos of interesting industry-relevant talks and business shows you go to. Show your subscribers what these events are all about.

2. Live Streams

If you want you can live stream events, or anything else for that matter. If your subscribers need to be up-to-date with everything that happens, invite them to watch your event on a live stream.

3. Presentations

Post videos of any of your presentations which display your ability to keep an audience’s attention. If you have any extra slides that you want to add to the presentation, post those as well. Upload the slideshow itself if it is particularly good, adding a voiceover for clarification.

4. Adverts and Promotions

Upload videos to accompany social media promotions that you run on Facebook and Twitter, or just create adverts specifically for YouTube.

You don’t have to be a big company to create an advert: Dollar Shave Club made the advert below and it went viral, garnering over 10 million views and winning the company a lot of new customers.  



5. Tour the Office

Show people where you work and what you do on a normal working day. Making it clear that your office is full of normal, hard-working people can make your business more personable.

6. Interviews

Interview the founders and the board members of your company. If you have products that only your company makes and distributes, interview the people involved in the creation process.

7. Meet the Staff

Introduce the people who work in your business. Invite them to talk about why they enjoy working for the company. Ask them what they think makes your company stand out from the competition. Talking heads videos are very popular at the moment, especially with web companies like Google and Facebook.

8. Tell your Story

Make a video about the history of your company and embed it on your company website. If you have an interesting story to tell, tell it. Business’ with inspiring foundation stories can help to create more buzz around the industry they work in.

9. Products and Services

Introduce new products and services, and describe the benefits of your current ones, with videos that you post on YouTube and embed on your website’s product pages.

10. How To

Make ‘how to’ videos about your products, or about products within your industry. ‘How to’ videos are very popular on YouTube. If there isn’t a good explanatory video for a product relevant to your industry, creating one could help publicise your company.

11. FAQs

Answer the most common questions that your customers have with videos. Embed it onto the FAQs page on your company’s website to accompany a text version of FAQs and answers.

12. Experts

Conduct interviews with experts and respected figures within your industry. By associating yourself with leading figures within your industry and getting them to enter into engaging debates, you will raise your business’ profile.

13. Hints and Tips

Upload videos of useful hints and tips for those working in your industry. For example, I could create a video recounting everything I say in this blog post and post it on YouTube.

14. Testimonials

Ask your contented customers to record videos of themselves using your products and services, explaining how they were really useful. Or you could invite your customers in and make the videos yourself.

15. Contests

Run contests and competitions using YouTube by uploading videos with contest information on the site and them embedding them on the competition page. Competitions which ask entrants to like pages on Facebook or subscribe to channels on YouTube will increase social media engagement.

You could even run contests asking your subscribers to post the best video online, challenging them to create a video of the most innovative use of your product. You could then upload the best videos onto your channel.

Nissan’s advert below invited customers to use a hashtag to contribute ideas for a new car:



16. Blog Posts

Make videos to accompany the blog posts you write and embed them in your blog. Explanatory videos will help you get the point of your articles across. Also, videos help web pages appear higher in Google searches.

17. Podcasts

If you have a regular podcast show, why not visualize it? You could record a weekly/ fortnightly/monthly video with updates and announcements, or you could create graphics to accompany your voice recordings.

18. Responses

Read out emails that you have received and answer the questions they ask. Customers will appreciate the fact that you have taken the time to read and respond to their emails. Posting the videos on YouTube will ensure that everyone can see them, making it less likely that the same questions arise over and over again.

19. Announcements

Celebrate a milestone or your company’s anniversary. Announce new products and services that are in development. build interest and excitement for your upcoming releases.

20. Archive

If you have an archive of old videos, post those that you think are relevant and interesting to viewers. In the past, companies have uploaded old adverts to YouTube which have gone viral, raising brand awareness and increasing customer interest.


What sort of videos do you post on your business’ YouTube channel?

How To Make The Most Of Your Business’ YouTube Channel

YouTube is by far the most popular video sharing site online. 72 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute, there are more than 1 billion unique visitors to the site every month and they watch over 4 billion hours of content in that time. These astronomical engagement and audience figures make YouTube a must-use social media site for companies who want to promote themselves using visual media.

So, how do you make the most of your business’ YouTube channel? It is imperative, of course, that you get the videos right, but the rest of your channel needs to be maintained as well: before the videos, you need to create the right channel to represent your business; after the videos, you need to promote them online and monitor the success of your content. Here are a few hints and tips on how to make the most of your channel.

1. Before the Videos

If you are making videos for YouTube, you need the right equipment. Do you have a camera and editing software? Do you have sound recording equipment and employees who know how to handle it? Of course, depending on the quality of the videos you intend to create, you could always use a mobile phone with a good quality camera, a much cheaper and easier option.

So, you have the equipment, now you can start creating your channel. If your company is a large, umbrella corporation, you could have a number of different channels for different brands. For most companies, however, its advisable to just have one channel: think of it as a brand page, which everyone will associate with your company.

Name your channel after your brand, if you can, or as close to your brand name as possible. Use industry keywords in your about section and upload an interesting and original background. Make sure the theme of your channel connects with your business. Manage your tabs. Have your subscribe button and logo prominently placed, with subscriber and view counters in the corner. Don’t forget to put links to all your other websites and social media profiles at the top of the page.

Do you already have an archive of company videos from events or old advertisements? Don’t dump it all on your YouTube channel, select the videos that are relevant and interesting and post them in intervals.

2. The Videos

There are dozens of kinds of video that you can post on YouTube to promote your brand and increase engagement with the public online. Here are a few quick ideas: presentations of products, interviews with staff and experts, a tour of the office, a video explaining your product, a customer testimonial. Another good idea is livestreaming your events on YouTube, advertising them beforehand to ensure a large audience.
Title and tag your videos with relevant keywords. YouTube is a Google affiliate, so videos posted to the site appear high in relevant searches. YouTube itself has the second largest search engine on the web, after Google, so you need to ensure that you optimize your video descriptions with keywords so that they appear high in searches. Tags are especially important to get right, as they affect what videos get displayed in the “relevant videos” section.

YouTube videos can be as long as you want now, but it’s still best to edit your videos down – people have a short attention span on YouTube. Of course, if your video needs to be long, don’t worry: people will watch it if the content and is interesting enough to them.

YouTube allows you to choose between one of three screenshots from the video as the screenshot shown before it plays. choose wisely: the screenshot will effect how much engagement your videos get. Categorise your videos into specific playlists to make it easier for subscribers and visitors to navigate around the page.

3. Engagement

Do you want to allow comments on your videos? I’d advise against it: the majority of people who comment on YouTube are trolling. Of course, you can delete comments at any time, but there may be too many comments to manage.

Get people to engage by asking them to subscribe to your channel. Use annotations to promote engagement with your videos. For example, ask people to click on an annotation to view the product page of a product that appears in an advert you post on YouTube. make sure that your like, share and subscribe buttons are always prominently placed.

Embed your videos on your other social media sites and on your website. Create an introductory video talking about your company and embed it on the front page of your website, or create product videos and post them on your sales pages.

Use Google Analytics to measure the engagement of your videos. See what videos prove the most popular and with who, then optimise your channel and your videos to get the most interaction you can.

How do you make the most of your YouTube page?