You’ve got your shiny new video and you want to share it with the world, but how do you go about this? Social media is a great way to engage with your audience and share information, so here’s some tips on how to get your video out there in the best way possible.
Always link back to your website
In almost every circumstance we would recommend that whenever you post or publish something onto social media, whether it includes a video or not, you link it back to your website. This maintains a consistent brand message and ensures that you are directing people back to a central information point. The added benefit is that once on your website you can then encourage them to look at other pages.
Posting links
On your social media post, simply copy and paste the link to the page where your video sits, adding your message and hashtags, then post.
Twitter now shortens links and shows a smaller preview version. The link doesn’t towards the main 140 character limit, so you don’t need to use link shorteners like Bitly and Owly any more.
Uploading actual video files
The trouble with posting a link to a webpage is your video won’t show in the feed. Some people would prefer to have the video displayed in the news feed either as autoplay (plays automatically when scrolling past) or when directly clicked on.
To do this you will need to either:
a) use an integrated video player platform such as YouTube or Vimeo like we have above (but take a look at our YouTube vs Vimeo help guide before you do this) or,
b) upload the actual video file hosted on your server or computer.
However, the downside to this is:
- No opportunity for people to go to your website
- Large video files hosted on your computer and server can take up a lot of your storage
- Hard to track or remember where you have uploaded videos
- If you update or replace the content of the video, you will still have the out of date versions live in other places
The middle ground
We find it useful to take a screen shot of the video and add this to your social media post as an image. Then add your message, hashtags and link to the relevant webpage where the video sits. As shown in the example below, the image will show in the news feed and gives people a preview of the video as well as taking them to your website.
Has this answered your question? If you need further help then please get in contact and we’d be happy to chat.
