Best Way to Promote Self Hosted Videos?

[trickshotric]

We are soon to launch 25 short videos on one of our websites. They are a little bit different and I think they have a particularly good chance of going viral.

The videos will be scattered over the website on our actual sales pages (not tucked away on our blog). We are hoping (expecting) that customers will click on them and subsequently share them mainly due to the surprise / fun factor.

I've got a lot of experience promoting our (linkbait) blog posts which usually get between 10,000 and 100,000 hits via social media blogs, however, I have no experience promoting video.

We will do the offsite social blog promotions as normal, however, my two main concerns are:

1. I'm unsure how best to use the social buttons (facebook like/share tweet and G+). As I understand it (I could very much be wrong), I can either embed the social buttons on the videos so that they are easily shared across facebook etc... or I can make the the social button make the user 'Like' / 'Share' the page that the video is on.

I assume that the latter option is better for website promotion but maybe not good for people sharing the video on Facebook etc. some of the videos do not have pride of place on our pages.

An explanation or examples on the best option would be appreciated.

2. Should we hold off from putting the videos on YouTube until the website has earned some of the juice first? Or are we missing out on and opportunity by not offering all avenues at once?

Any other tips would be greatly appreciated too!

They will hopefully be up and running by the end of the month so I'll come back and let you know how it went.

Thank you for your time guys and gals!

Richard (Moz Customer 2391745)

PS. If it is of interest we are using JW Player

[trickshotric]

Thanks for your answer and useful tips. Totally agree with your point about seeing the content. However, we really want to keep it under wraps until the launch.

The vast majority of the videos are very funny in the context of the website and not necessarily as amazing as a stand alone YouTube video.

After some consideration and further research we are going self hosted. I think that going for a slow burning approach will benefit our site more, hopefully bringing in social/links over a period of time.

Any viral instances would be a bonus!

Thanks again.

Richard

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Richard,

Great set of questions. The main thing I want to highlight is that it's actually completely impossible for anyone to answer the questions you ask with any level of quality or detail without first spending some time looking into your content.

The decisions you make regarding YouTube vs self-hosted and how you promote the content absolutely have to be driven by the content itself and there's no strategy relevant without first looking into this. Would you be willing to share some of the content within this question so I can have a look at it?

All that said - there's a few principles here that are relevant to your situations. If you're trying to make something "go viral" in the social sense, YouTube is going to be more or less the only platform that will allow you to do this. However, if you're trying to drive traffic to your own product pages on your site - having the content self hosted and not putting it on YouTube at all is the right way to go. This is because YouTube can outrank you for your own content, but more importantly, the kind of content that will help to drive traffic and conversions on your site is almost never the kind of content that will also go viral. The two approaches are mutually exclusive.

If you're using JW player - the social buttons will point back to the page, which is cool, but make sure you're also including open graph tags and including all of the relevant meta data for that - e.g. video thumbnail  so that the videos share nicely across facebook.

Cheers,

Phil.

[trickshotric]

Thank you for your detailed answer.

We initially had a Vimeo Pro Account, and was tittering on switching to youtube and following a similar pattern as you describe.

Amongst the reasons that we decided to self-host was that we would get the direct benefit of people embedding the videos rather that the 3rd party site.

There was also a bit of functionality (as you mention) that we want to add
There was also a fear of youtube ads appearing on the video (which may be an unfounded opinion).

Thanks again.

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

Richard --

How about a hybrid solution?:

• Post exclusively on YouTube
• Embed YouTube video on your web page
• Add social media voting mechanisms on the web page

Benefits

• Key Benefit: Google SERP's promote YouTube videos most heavily, (e.g. "how to use microsoft pro charm bar")
• YouTube takes the bandwidth
• Searchable on YouTube
• Still gives you a linkable web page

Unless there's another reason that you want this video stored exclusively on your servers, or if you have advanced video playing features that you want to make available to your users, I think YouTube is the way to go.

--Andrew