5 Important Things To Consider For Your Online Video Strategy

Video August 31, 2010 4 Comments




I gave a video training day today teaching people how to get the most out of online video and while giving the course it dawned on me the same old myths keep on popping their head up the more I talk to people about video. People have a lot of misconceptions about online video and just how popular their videos will be. I don’t know what it is about video in that everybody seems to have an opinion and think that they were born with some sort of Stephen Spielbergesque directing ability. I guess it is just the fact that we have all watched so much television and movies and think we all have an innate knowledge of how it should work. With that in mind I wanted to try and save everybody who is thinking about getting an online strategy for video a few little pointers that I have learned the hard way…

You Probably Don’t Need Expensive Equipment

If I had a penny for everybody who asked me what sort of camera equipment they should buy I would be a very rich man indeed. My standard answer is to buy a camera that costs a couple of hundred Euros at most as it will do the job you want it to and see how your video career progresses before you splash out on the expensive stuff. Despite repeating that over and over again you would be surprised at how many people still go and spend nearly a thousand Euros on camera equipment that they just don’t use and sits dusty in a cupboard. If you want something simple for filming interviews and small videos for Youtube I would go with a flip camera which you can pick up for as little as 100 Euros on Ebay.

Get A Youtube Strategy

Putting your videos on to Youtube is not your entire strategy. I talk to so many people that think Youtube is going to be the answer to all their problems and that the views will just flow as soon as they upload them to the world’s largest video site. People will have heard some of the stats and you have to realize that although there are billions of video views there is also plenty of competition for views. People need to engage within Youtube and treat it as more of the social network that it is rather than just blasting their videos out and expecting views, that’s the old way of doing things and we should know better given we have so many great free social tools at our disposal. Get a proper Youtube strategy instead of just loading them up and hoping for the best. I will give you a little hint and tell you that it is all about…Subscribers!!

There Is No Such Thing As A Viral Video

Over and over again people come along and ask us for viral videos. Worse still I see people who flaunt videos around calling them viral videos before they go live or selling the promise of a viral video. I’ve made over 1000 videos that have had nearly 10 million views and I still don’t think I have made what you would call a viral video. Sitting down in a room and coming up with a concept that is viral is practically impossible. I’m not saying that it can’t be done but creating a video for a couple of hundred Euros that will get a million views is next to impossible. A lot of videos that people hold up as successful virals by brands actually have huge budgets behind them both to produce them to seed them out with advertising, media spend and PR to kick them off. Take this video featuring Roger Federer for example, you really think that was just off the cuff and uploaded to Youtube and became a success by accident?

Is An Interview With Your CEO Really Interesting?

I see so many companies engaging with videos that feature their key staff or CEO sitting there talking about his ambition for the company or some other product launch that the rest of the world probably doesn’t really care all that much about. I’m not saying to ignore doing interviews or corporate messenging pieces as they can be highly effective for larger brands and businesses but don’t bombard your audience with videos that scream “me me me”. If you are doing interview pieces see if you can liven them up or do something other than just a piece to camera. You really can get creative and try and stand out form the crowd because there are millions of other employees just doing interviews.

Focus On Views On 3rd Party Sites

There is no doubt that getting views on Youtube can be tricky, it takes lots of hard work and you can have very little control over it. What you do have control over though is getting your video embedded on 3rd party sites. I’m talking about getting them embedded to your own website or blog, appearing on Facebook or reaching out to other niche websites to cover them. You’d be surprised at just how much this can help you increase the views on your videos and it is one of the main ideas I would be focused on if I was looking for video views as a metric.

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