Social Video Marketing Strategy in Four Easy Steps

A lot of marketers are making a very common mistake in regards to producing video content for social media. They are creating content without thinking about who will be consuming it. Then they’re blasting that unfocused content out to all of their social media followers under the assumption that people who want to see it will watch, and those who do not want to see it will skip over it.
This is the absolute lease effective method of integrating video marketing and social media that I can think of. So how do you fix it?

1. Start seeing the forest for the trees.

See, many marketers lump the so-called “socialsphere” into two groups: People I Want to Follow Me and everyone else. The people in the first group consist of all of those people who are in a specific industry, or who blog about a particular industry, or who have enormous influence in the particular social media outlet in question. The second group consists of, well… everyone else.
The thing is, this isn’t how social media works. Each social media outlet is comprised not of a giant group of individuals, but of a complex series of networks. Your job as a social media marketer is not to get a gigantic number of people following your updates on a given site — though that is nice — but to ensure that the greatest number of people engage with your content.
The difference is subtle, but important. To reach an entire network of people, the entire network does not need to be following you. In fact, most of them don’t need to follow you. All you really need is one solid contact who finds your content valuable who will then spread your content to the rest of the network.

2. Create incredibly specific content.

Tighten the focus of your content as narrowly as is humanly possible. Really successful video + social campaigns focus on the specific problems faced by the individual members of a company in a certain industry at a particular time of year. Will this kind of video ever “go viral”? Not a chance. But if your solution is a good one, and if the video content is interesting, then people will engage with it.

3. Make sure your content is sharable.

This is a no-brainer. If your target audience is on Twitter, make sure your video content is easy to share on Twitter. Same with Facebook and LinkedIN and whatever other social networks your potential customers frequent. And… um… that’s all I have to say about that.

4. Find the gatekeeper.

You know that one guy in your group of friends who has connections all over the place? The guy that can get you tickets to the game on a moment’s notice? The guy who greets everyone in town by name? Maybe you are that guy (if so, skip to the next bullet). But if not, you need to find that guy in your target network, interact with him, and get him to find the value of your video content — which should be easy to do if you’ve done a good job narrowly focusing the content of your video. If you succeed at this, your content will spread among his network. A very good thing.
So to review: Identify your target network, create narrowly-focused content for that network, optimize that content for sharing, send it to the person (or people) who is most influential in that network. That, friends, is a successful video + social strategy in four simple steps.

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