5 Things to do with Your Video Once It’s Complete

You’ve booked the studio, wrote your script, shot the video and now you’re holding on to the greatest tool in your pocket. But honestly, what’s next?

Sometimes videos are made for an exclusive purpose such as a commercial, a portion of a documentary, a story-line for a larger project or perhaps it’s something you just want to boast on social media. And if you’re savvy, you can make that video go viral. Very viral.

In either case, you may want to follow the information outlined below to gain better exposure and engagement. After all, you want your investment to pay off, and with any luck, show serious ROI from your efforts. Follow these items, and you’ll be sure to see a significant increase in views and engagements:

Get Your Video into the Cloud

You’ll need a reliable central place to store your store your video such as YouTube, Vimeo or other long-standing video hosting service. If you’re local to the Princeton or Central New Jersey Area, you may want to try YourTownTube.com as well. Better yet? Post it on all platforms that you can for better exposure. For this example, we’ll use YouTube as an example, strictly because Google OWNS YouTube and you know what that means: First page of search results (provided it’s unique enough to stand out from the rest) Always be sure that your title and description for your video grabs the attention of the viewer and contains content that little or no other companies are striving for. For example, if you’re making a video about carving a wooden spindle on a lathe, don’t name your video “Carving a Wooden Spindle on a Lathe,” but rather, “5 Easy Tips to Making your Lathe Spindle Better Than Theirs.”  This will certainly grab the attention of anyone who is striving to make a better spindle.

Centralize a Viewing Point

In order to (somewhat) accurately measure your views, reach and engagement, your video should be embedded on your website or blog.  Let this serve as a central hub where you send everyone while sharing your video.

Sprinkle that Video Everywhere You Can

We all know there are many places to share your video such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn but have you considered other avenues such as your email signature? How about whenever posting to Reddit or Bulletin Boards that you frequent? Guest blogging on another site? Creating slugs on your website (short, easy-to-remember URLs) that you can bring up in conversation is also a great way to get people to remember and think about your video before they get to their devices or computers.

Numbers and Campaigns

If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, there’s a great tool called Campaign URL Builder. This easy-to-use tool allows you to share your URL, but with one little trick up it’s sleeve: It’ll track where that visit came from. If you have shared your single video to, let’s say 6 places, each link you create will have an unique URL that passes a “campaign” to Google Analytics. These campaigns are automatically listed in your Google Account to see a plethora of statistics, the most important one being its origin. This will allow you to concentrate your efforts on what’s working versus what’s not.

Engage, Don’t Ignore

Once your video is out there, keep a close eye on those social channels for comments. Don’t ignore them! Reply to as many as you can to create even further engagement. Every time a comment is posted, reply to the comment even if it’s a simple ‘thank you for your kind words’ or for those negative posts, “We’re sorry you feel this way. We’ll try that next time. Thank you for the suggestion!”  Each time there is engagement on a post, your post gains popularity and notoriety. It’ll also get pushed up the list for those that follow you. Notifications on these posts (especially on Facebook) will be sent to the users that participated in the conversation about your video even further.