You’ve read a lot about the benefits of using video marketing. You got together some video production gear, or you contracted a digital media agency to produce a video for you. Your video is done, and it looks awesome. Now what?
The next step, of course, is dissemination. You need to put your video out there so that people can see it. One of the more effective ways to do it is to use social media to reach your audiences with the video. But which social platform should you use?
Choosing the social media platform you’ll use to spread your video is something you should do before you start production. When making that choice, you need to carefully weigh the pros and cons of each social channel against the goals you want to achieve.
YouTube
YouTube just might be the best hub for most of your video content. It has plenty of ways for viewers to interact with your videos — they can like, share, and comment, but you can also give them clickable spots that can lead them straight to your website. It also doesn’t hurt that YouTube has a huge audience and that it’s owned by Google, so you can also get a nice SEO boost.
YouTube’s size can also be an issue, as your content can easily disappear in the sea of other people’s content. And if you host videos on YouTube and embed them on your website, viewers might opt to view them on YouTube instead, where they are less likely to sit through the whole video.
The biggest social network in the world is a great place to share your video content. You can benefit from the following your business already has, and you can reach new audiences with likes and shares. And best of all, you can directly communicate with your audience using Facebook.
The content you post on Facebook is short-lived. Sure, it will stay on your business’ page, but it will disappear from people’s timelines as soon as the likes and shares stop coming in. The fact that Facebook doesn’t play as well with the rest of the internet as YouTube does will also matter a lot if you want to use the social network as the primary host for your videos. And you won’t have a lot of options to include calls to action and links in your videos.
Facebook owns Instagram, so there’s no reason not to use Instagram when you’re already using Facebook. It has a large and active user base, and it has a couple of different video services you can use.
On the flip side, the length of your videos will be capped at 60 seconds for regular videos, and 15 seconds for Stories. Instagram’s user base is fairly young, so you shouldn’t expect a lot of diversity of age groups, which might not work well with your audience targeting. You’ll also have a limited space to use words or links, which might make it difficult to siphon your Instagram audience to your website.
If your business is using Twitter, video is the type of content you want to share the most. Twitter reveals that video is the type of content that most share on the social network. And you also have the chance to use live video with Periscope.
Twitter doesn’t offer much in terms of targeting a specific audience. And it’s also a social network that’s very fast-paced, so you shouldn’t expect your video to be long-lived.
