Thought Leadership Monday Mashup: Video Distribution Strategy

Once you have completed your marketing video, how many online video distribution channels should you consider? Should you just put your video up on YouTube or on your own site with another platform or both? Explore digital video distribution strategies with some video thought leaders.

Online video distribution has become more important as video platforms and video distribution channels emerge online. Where should you be devoting your efforts though?  The once and mighty king of online video distribution, YouTube, still reigns supreme. But each year as video grows on the Internet, online audiences are consuming video on more platforms than ever before. Believe it or not, the majority of online video views now actually reside outside of YouTube. Facebook in particular has made a massive push in video and has a calculated way of pushing YouTube’s buttons. Have you noticed as you scroll through your Facebook news feed how all the videos come to life? In fact, any 3 second automatic trigger of video play is actually counted by Facebook as a video view. Is Facebook playing by the same rules as everyone else when they claim viewership on their platform? Hank Green doesn’t think so. In his salvo Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video, not only are these Facebook video counts misleading marketing metrics moguls, but they are encouraging unethical behavior. In this environment the argument goes, people are getting view crazy and will stop at nothing to get their fix of viewership and Facebook is a great breeding ground for this behavior.  The act of Freebooting is taking someone else’s video from YouTube and uploading it without the original creators permission onto Facebook to garner lots of “original views” from it.  This is a reprehensible practice.

Many other social video platforms, while perhaps not as aggressive as Facebook, are still planting their stake in the viewership wars as well. Instagram, Snapchat, Vine and many other social media channels present opportunities for engaging viewers.

A primary question for a video content creator should be, why are you looking for viewership? Is it simply to entertain or educate your audience wherever they are? Is it for brand awareness or are you looking for video lead conversion? Are the video players and platforms you are using giving you the information that you want about your viewers? Platforms like Brightcove, Ooyala and Wista can provide rich integration through API directly with your marketing platform. Should you have a multi-platform video distribution strategy?

Mark Robertson of ReelSEO suggests that while your own website is a prime destination for your audience, you need to consider how and where to attract an audience.

Jake Larsen of Video Power Marketing encourages distributing your video through social video marketing. “You need to get your video out there. Your video is useless if nobody sees it. Your ability to market your product or business with video, means it’s important that you have distribution to help you get it out to the right audience.”

Individual view counts of a video or even an audience size may not be as important to you as the right audience. If you have a marketing video distribution strategy that ultimately is looking to build lead conversion, you will want to get the video viewers to a landing page for video lead conversion. You can share your video on a blog and in turn share that blog to Twitter and other social channels. In addition, you may consider alternate edits for different video platforms like YouTube and Facebook.

Tommie Powers of TommiePowers.com expresses an enthusiasm that many of us have for where online video is going: “Cable TV is dropping off significantly. It’s just a matter of time before what TV technically represents is going to be digital. You’ve got all of these social platforms, so I mean it’s just going to continue to explode. I think we are just in the very infant stages of what online video will ultimately be, so I’m pretty excited by it.”

So how do you spend and devote your time properly if you have a multi-platform video distribution strategy? Robertson feels that not only will more platforms be available, but publishing video will get easier.