Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Everyone likes to watch videos on the web.

According to official statistics from YouTube, they have ” over a billion users — almost one-third of all people on the Internet — and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views.”  The statistics portal Statista notes “As of July 2015, more than 400 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute, up from 300 hours per minute in November 2014.”

Wacky cats, wacky stunts, cute cats, cute kids, offensive comedy, and R-rated content are some of the most popular methods to drive traffic. But if someone is trying to promote a product, service, personality or other business, traffic isn’t always the most important metric. Reaching the right audience with the right message becomes the goal. Cute babies might get clicks, but not business.

Audiences are bombarded by words and messages. In a short attention world addicted to entertainment, videos serve as great vehicles for public relations. But videos can be expensive and time-consuming to produce. To discover what works, an all-star panel of publicists and marketers gave us their best advice and, along with me, selected a few of their favorites.  Here’s how to gain market share, reach audiences and achieve some of your public relations goals using video in a very competitive world.

Video marketing has been unanimously chosen as one of the rising stars in marketing corridors, thanks to social integration and investments by Internet giants. It is gaining a vital place in the marketing plans of all major companies to connect with consumers, engage with them and convert them into paying customers.

Don’t believe the hype? Here are some statistics to prove the point. According toSyndacast, 74 percent of all Internet traffic in 2017 will be video. Not only that, studies show that using the word “Video” in the subject line of an email can increase open rates by 19 percent, click-through rates by 65 percent and reduce un-subscribers by 26 percent. According to Twitter, videos and photos get the most retweets....

Adding video to a landing page makes it 53% more likely to appear on the first page of Google results. (Source: AdWeek Social Times)

A thumbnail image of the video is presented on the search engine results page (SERP), which makes it stand out amongst the text-based listings and is therefore twice as likely to get clicked. What’s more, YouTube is the second largest search engine and the web’s third most trafficked site. 

Social success

People love sharing video on social media networks. And social networks are encouraging people to share video. Facebook has made a clear commitment to video adding auto-play, view counts, and more mobile functionality to its native video player. Twitter has a native app allowing you to record, edit and tweet videos under 30 seconds long. Vine is ALL videos.

Live streaming apps such as Blab and Periscope are rocking social media. The list goes on....

Without ever getting into YouTube, you can do short videos on several social media sites. On Vine, they last six seconds, Instagram they are 15 seconds, and on Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook the videos can be as long as 2–3 minutes. Once videos are created, they can also be pinned on Pinterest.

You don’t need expensive camera equipment, though it will add to the quality if you do use something different than you smartphone camera. It should do a decent job until you have the funds to invest in something better. Short videos are like a dessert or snack, just enough to satisfy and not so much that in the middle you’ve had enough and are trying to figure out how to end it sooner rather than later. And getting the story or information visually is almost always preferred to reading about it.

Much has been written in these columns about the use of online video and how it is becoming essential for any serious brand online. It's used in promotion, video ads, "how to" and explainer videos, user-generated videos, contests, live event streaming and much more.But if you know little or nothing about video production, where do you start and how difficult is it likely to be?

Let's take a quick look at seven sites that can really help – and even have you making animated videos in hours.

1. ReelSEO
2. New York Video School
3. VideoScribe from Sparkol
4. IzzyVideo
5. Skype Video Recorder
6. Vimeo Video School
7. Coursera.org...