You've probably heard a lot about making your videos go viral on social media. Most likely, that is what you're hoping for when you post your latest video on your Twitter and Facebook pages. But do you have a tangible strategy for going viral? We have a few ways that you can share your videos on social media and other channels through automation. This makes the process more efficient and makes it more likely that your videos will be shared with an ever wider audience.
Capture Audience Interest in the First Five Seconds
This strategy cannot be automated, unfortunately, but it is an essential part of achieving viral video status. You absolutely must gain and hold your audience's attention at the very beginning of the video. If not, your video is unlikely to be shared or retweeted. This can be achieved with dramatic music, by asking a powerful question, by featuring a celebrity and so on. Do your research and craft your video intro so that it really engages right away.
Share Your Videos with Big Names
Do you know anyone who has a lot of followers or friends on social media? Reach out to them and see if you can get them to share your video. If they do share your video, it will reach a lot more people than you could ever reach just by posting it on your own social media pages.
You can reach a lot of people by automating the process of reaching out. Create a list of people who you want to reach out to and include their contact information. Create a message that is personal and engaging, using a pre-made template for simplicity's sake. Then tell your marketing automation to send out the message at a scheduled time to all the people you want to reach. You can even A/B split test two different subject lines or send times to see which one performs better. After it sends, review the report that is generated. This will tell you who opened the message, which messages bounced and more.
Everywhere You Post Your Video, Include Social Sharing Buttons
Making it easy to post your video is a key step for getting it shared more widely. No matter where you post your video online, make social sharing buttons immediately available. This allows people to share the video with one click, quick and simple.
Offer the Chance to Win
People are much more likely to share your video if you include an incentive. Contests are an effective way of doing this on social media. Depending on your business, give people the opportunity to win a relevant product or service by sharing. When they share the video, they are entered to win. Automate your contest posts so they will go out every day throughout the day without you having to manage them.
Optimize Your Social Media Messages Based on Real Data
After you post each message on your social media pages, see a detailed report of how your audience interacted with it. View how many people shared, how many commented and what they said, how many liked and retweeted and so on.
So what does all this information mean? By testing and retesting, you can learn which messages have the highest interaction. Then create more messages that have similar aspects to the best performing ones. This includes what time you schedule your message to post, what content you include in your post, whether or not you are targeting specific groups and more. When you view your reports, you learn which are the best times to post and what is the most effective types of content.
Cross-Promote Your Videos on Other Channels
Promoting your videos on other communication and marketing channels besides just social media is a great way to boost your audience and get more people to share. Do you have an email list of people who have signed up to receive video updates? If not, it's time to start one! You shouldn't send the actual video in the email because that will almost always cause it to be caught by spam filters. Instead, send a link to your video and invite people to share. Emails are automated very easily.
Text messaging is another great channel to use when you're promoting your videos. Text messaging is a very immediate form of communication because most text messages will be opened within five minutes of being received. Send the link to your video in the text message and ask people to share. Text messages are also simple to automate.
Don't Be Afraid to Retweet and Repost a Video
If your video doesn't go viral at first, perhaps it needs another kick. Retweet and repost videos a few times and acknowledge to your audience that you have posted them before. "Did you miss this great video?" or "This is one of our favorites from the video archive" lets people know it's already been posted without taking away from the video.
Try Automated Video Marketing for Free
SimplyCast offers a comprehensive, all-in-one, fully automated video marketing solution. Sign up for a 14 day free trial to see how it will improve your marketing process efficiency. We can't guarantee that your video will go viral, but we know that your viral video marketing process will be much more efficient and much less time-consuming.
