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CREATING A SUCCESSFUL SOCIAL MEDIA VIDEO FOR YOUR BRAND

bsp-admin-1 on October 25, 2016

When creating a video that will be used for social media, it’s important to use the right type of video in the right place. Social video distribution isn’t about pushing it out to all channels and crossing your fingers. Let’s walk through this step-by-step.

Social Video Creative Process

Before creating a video for social media, it’s important to understand what a video does well on social and what does not do well. Here are four social video concepts for some inspiration.

  • How-to video. Show your audience how to do something. It’s engaging, you are reaching your target market, and best of all, you’re providing value.
  • Day-in-the-life video. Show your customers, prospects and fans what it’s like to be you for a day. Pick an employee and highlight their day. This humanizes your brand, extolls the values of your company culture, and can also be great for recruiting.
  • Product launch video. Awe your audience with a short product launch video that catches their eye. Make it different, fast and exciting. You can create anticipation with social video, but remember to use this format sparingly.
  • Event showcase video. Create a short video highlighting the best moments of your event along with some quick interview snippets with your attendees and speakers. This is a great way to extend any potential event sponsorships. Again, your audience should walk away having learned something new. It’s not simply about overall event presence.

Strive to give your audience a deeper understanding of who you are and what your brand stands for through social video. Stay away from videos that constantly promote your services and products. It’s okay to do this once in a while (product launch video), but your audience will eventually get tired of it and move on. Videos with deeper insights on your products or services will do much better on your website’s video gallery.

Social video is an amazing top-of-the-funnel marketing strategy that builds awareness and drives engagement for prospects. Other campaigns can aid in retention, building a community and buoying customer advocacy. This all depends on your business goals and the type of content you decide to create. Remember this when beginning your creative process.

Social Video Production

Once you have a good idea about what type of social video you are going to create, you need to work with your creative team to hash out the details.

Social Video Length

The length of your video plays a large role in the type of engagement you will get. For the most part, social videos should be anywhere from 15 to 60 seconds long. These lengths are great for getting your message across and not boring your audience.

Social Video Content

The most important element of a social video is your story. Creating great content means creating a great story. The first 4-5 seconds of your video will make or break it. Make sure to pull your audience in with something exciting.

Sit down with your creative team and storyboard your entire video out from start to finish. Storyboarding is an amazing way to visualize your video before you shoot it. This will help you craft your story into a great one.

Animation vs. Live Action

Brands often struggle deciding whether they should have an animated video or a live action video, but it really depends on your brand. A company like GoPro should stick to all live-action video. They do this very well. A B2B software company will definitely need to invest in animated video in order to get their points across successfully.

It’s important to keep in mind that all businesses, even those who rely heavily on animated video, should try their best to invest in live action video. There is nothing stronger than the human element in your videos.

Quick Tip: Most people watch social videos with the sound off. If you want to get your message across and have people speaking in your video, it’s a great idea to use captions.

Social Video Distribution

When your video is polished and ready for the world to see, it is vital that your social media distribution is executed effectively. So many big brands struggle in this area due to the lack of communication between the social media team and the marketing teams.

There are a couple things you must do in order to give your video the best chance of being successful organically.

Native Social Video

When posting your videos to your social media channels you must upload the video file natively. What this means is, you upload your video file directly to Facebook and directly to Twitter. Your video should also undoubtedly be on YouTube.

Why do we post natively you may ask?

Social channels like Facebook and Twitter will do a few great things if you upload directly to the platform. Your video will autoplay in the viewers newsfeed, your post will be prioritized in the social platforms algorithm, and you will get data on your video performance. Autoplay is important because it gives you the opportunity to catch the eye of your viewer without them having to click on your video first.

In terms of algorithms, Facebook and Twitter show users Facebook posts and tweets that are “important.” A video using their video player is prioritized higher than a video that has been linked from YouTube or Vimeo, therefore giving your video a better chance of getting viewed.

Repurposing Video Content For Mobile-First Platforms

More and more brands are moving to mobile-first platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. Repurposing for these platforms is easy and well worth the time if your audience is on these platforms.

Instagram

Instagram allows users to upload 60 seconds of video for a post. If your video is 60 seconds or less, you can post the video right to Instagram.

A great practice is posting small teaser videos for your video. Post a 5-10 second teaser video and put the link to the full video on your Youtube channel or Facebook channel in your Instagram description. Make sure to let your audience know that they can find the link in your description. This allows you to get engagement on two platforms, therefore building your social presence on both.

Since Instagram doesn’t allow you to post from your computer, follow these steps to repurpose videos on this platform.

  • Email your video file from your computer to your phone.
  • Save the video file to your photos and videos app on your mobile device.
  • Create a new post in Instagram by tapping the camera icon at the bottom of the app (there you will find your video that you are going to post).
  • If you are linking to a full version of the video on another website, copy and paste the link onto your profile page. To do this, go to your profile page, tap “Edit Profile” and paste the link where it says “Website.” Tell your followers in your video post that the full link is in your bio on your profile page.

Snapchat

If you have an audience on Snapchat, it’s important to alert them of your new video. Take some time to take a screenshot of your video and tell your Snapchat followers to go look at your video on your preferred social platform. Here is an example of how we did this on Snapchat.

SnapChat Social Video Promotion

A lot goes into making your social video a successful one. By using these strategies to create social video, you will see more views, more engagement, and more success as you dig into the world of social video.

BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIAL VIDEO: USING YOUTUBE FOR BUSINESS

bsp-admin-1 on October 11, 2016

YouTube is a great vehicle for awareness and discovery, as well as building a community. When it comes to keeping your brand the sole focus of the digital conversation, however, YouTube offers up too many distractions.

Think on your marketing goals and ask how you want business video content to be consumed or what the next step will be in the customer journey. Both a branded video gallery on your site and a YouTube channel have places in your video marketing strategy, together. Let’s consider the ways to make the most out of YouTube’s best attributes.

How to Tell Better Stories on Your YouTube Channel

Understanding the YouTube Audience

Knowing your audience is the key to differentiating which kinds of content you’ll promote on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or other social networking sites. You can also better understand a preferential match and focus your efforts on where your audiences live and play.

That being said, YouTube is a forum for the older millennial market, ages 25 to 34. Specific demographic information can be hard to come by, however, and the platform itself focuses on promoting watching patterns and channel preferences for niche content.

To that end, YouTube really thrives in the B2C space when we review the subject matter that gets the most play on the social site.

Women care about cosmetics, skincare, and weight loss while men enjoy gaming, weightlifting, and sports. Not very nuanced. Judgement aside, let’s consider why and how this content is consumed. These are all very instructional types of content. So if your content lends itself very easily to the “how to tie a tie” type of video, YouTube might be your best market for exposure.

Catering to YouTube’s Global Users

YouTube attracts a global audience, with 88 different countries and 76 languages represented. Furthermore, 80% of YouTube traffic comes from outside of the United States. One could reason that because of the instructional nature of its content, YouTube gained a foothold with international audiences who could watch and learn without subtitles.

The site has since rectified this with a wide variety of languages available for subtitling, and in the interest of an accessible internet, they’ve made auto-captioning available. If you’re speaking to a global audience, video content in their native tongue is always best. But if this isn’t feasible, make sure to caption your content and have a native speaker review for accuracy.

Appealing to How and Where YouTubers Watch Video

YouTube is kind of like going down a rabbit hole of content: specific and related. It’s about being constantly entertained. This is why YouTube serves their viewers related content and personalized suggestions wherever they might live (i.e. not on your channel) so that viewers can truly binge on video content.

Interestingly enough, most YouTube users are on mobile, and yet, they view videos for 40 minutes on average. As most videos on YouTube average two minutes, let’s take a second to consider what this means. That’s nearly 20 videos viewed on a small screen.

YouTube viewers get engrossed on a particular subject matter or maybe even hope to master certain techniques through demonstrative content. So they watch video, after video, after video. For this reason, we would recommend that your content is longer-form and goes deep, even utilizing playlists. While brevity is key on other social networks, YouTube viewers don’t really want lighter content.

While Facebook is making leaps and bounds, YouTube is still taking up valuable video real estate with 11.3x more videos than Facebook. The question is, how much of that is historical and can they maintain this dominance?

Facebook is a place where we engage passively, everyday. YouTube has become a destination, or sometimes (depending on how well you optimize your content), a search engine. These differences will affect engagement on each network.

What Kind of Video Content to Create for YouTube

The type of content you create is always going to differ according to your goals and distribution platforms (such as Facebook or Twitter). For businesses, YouTube works well in the awareness and engagement stages, after which you move them to your site for conversion.

Talking head videos get a lot of flack. But to be fair, they’re still quite popular and effective on YouTube. Why? Because YouTube is a place for personalities. The human aspect of video is alive and well on YouTube. It’s okay to be conversational. Businesses should consider taking some of their most passionate and engaging personalities and putting them in front of the camera.

That being said, use these personalities to teach and share their knowledge, elevating your brand as a thought leader. Instructional videos, experts answering how-to queries like your most common prospect questions, or longer form stories that need room to breathe can all work well on YouTube. Archival content can also be housed on YouTube. Just don’t dump; optimize and thoughtfully curate these videos.

YouTube has also advised it’s own creators (those who utilize and are paid full-time through the YouTube monetization network) to work together. YouTube “stars” regularly guest on each others shows. This creates shared authority, exposes audiences to related content, and builds SEO. YouTube’s creator program and the collaboration they have encouraged has laid the foundation to give us the most relevant information and content, unsurprisingly quite similar to Google search.

Driving Traffic Back to Your Site from YouTube

Ideally, you should house some of your content on YouTube and some on your own website. YouTube videos can be teasers or previews that push to full-length content on your site. Sometimes several full length videos can play together in a YouTube playlist. But they should still push to a full video hub on your site where more content options exist, such as interactive video to elevate the brand experience or contextual CTAs to drive the customer journey. Keep the user experience paramount and the transitions between properties smooth and simple.

How to Optimize Social Video on YouTube

YouTube Video
Counts as view 30 seconds
Autoplay default? Yes
Autoloop? No
Audio state default On
Maximum length None
Public view counts? Yes
Metrics dashboard? Yes
Favors native video? N/A

source: Digiday

Tell a Story – Play with Video Length

YouTube is chock full of content creators and storytellers. Join them and start playing around with length. We think you should use as much time you need to adequately tell your story. Since YouTube isn’t a feed-like format (like Twitter and Facebook), you can play with overall video length and stop worrying about catching attention as users scroll.

Of the most engaging uploads, videos that were between 16 seconds and 2 minutes in length had 53.8% of all YouTube views. This contrasts sharply against our advice around Twitter and Facebook social video length where the optimal lengths are 30 seconds and 15 seconds, respectfully.

TrackMaven YouTube video length chart

Source: SocialBakers via TrackMaven

Ignore Autoplay and Optimize Your Video Thumbnails

While you have the ability to curate content on YouTube, ultimately it’s a thumbnail that will determine if the user will click to play. Faces are more effective than inanimate objects.

Use Copy Intelligently

Beyond the video script, there are several other places to strategically use copy on YouTube videos.

  • Creative. Words within your video content aid in attention, retention, and the ability to consume without sound.
  • Metadata. YouTube is a search engine and remember, search engines are powered by text. Don’t skimp on video descriptions or video tags if you want your content found.
  • Subtitles and captions. Speak to audiences in their native tongue. For globally scaling your content, subtitles are required. In the interest of an accessible web, add captions to your videos and consider how users will consume your content when sound is off in sound-sensitive environments like a workplace or commuter train.
  • CTAs. Use CTAs or small text-based buttons you can embed on your YouTube videos. It doesn’t have to be wholly conversion focused, just tell them what to do or where to go next. Give them more content to consume whether it be video, blog, or e-book.

Record a YouTube Channel Greeting

Get them interested right off the bat with the teaser for your channel. This is the one area where YouTube autoplays. It’s important that that first video is engaging and describes the mission of the channel, what types of content audiences can expect to see.

Upon completion of your video greeting, viewers should be presented with options to continue watching. Create an end screen with custom annotations that list several video options. Where they land should, again, be a video that is situated in a playlist. If the only expectation is that the user will watch that playlist on YouTube and continue to stay there, great. If you’d like them to eventually move to your site or a content download, make sure to tee it up and then link this CTA.

Furthermore, keep in mind that since a majority of YouTube viewers are on mobile, consider the mobile experience across every point of the customer journey.

Engage Your Channel Viewers with Playlists

Creating playlists ensures that viewers stay engaged in your content instead of being pushed to relevant content chosen by YouTube or if the viewer’s eyes start to wander to the right-hand side bar. Choose descriptive titles for your playlists which help your channel SEO. And while you’re categorizing and optimizing, don’t neglect video tags. The top 25% of YouTube brands use 2x as many video tags as the lower 25%.

Using video playlists for engagement

Source: Brafton

Publish Regularly, Embrace Episodic Content

While it’s important to just get started with video and try new things, marketers like plans. What you should plan for in your YouTube social video strategy is for your channel to hit themes. By regularly hitting the same topics on the same days, not only will your users know what to expect of you, but YouTube will reward your dedication. Again, it’s just an SEO best practice.

Decide How Advertising Will Affect the User Experience

While getting attention up front and quickly is important on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, audiences expect to wait through advertising on YouTube. So in considering the optimal user experience, you may be okay to add advertising or a quick branded bumper depending on the purpose behind your presence on YouTube.

Communicate with Your Audience

As YouTube is a social network, be social. Take time to respond to audience comments and go so far as to solicit them within the content of your videos. You can also try polling and surveys. Your video marketing strategy will be much better informed if you manage this feedback loop.

YouTube is a great vehicle for awareness and discovery, and the beginning of the customer journey is where it excels as a social media site. As you explore it, optimize your channel for discoverability and use it in tandem with Twitter and Facebook—crafting a different strategy with different video content for each network and audience.

USING WATCH FOLDERS FOR AUTOMATED TRANSCODING

bsp-admin-1 on September 30, 2016

Watch folders (also called “drop folders” or “hot folders”) are a quick and easy tool for batch automating any file-based workflow. If you regularly transcode your media to the same set of formats, you can just drop raw files in a folder and watch transcoded files come out the other end. This is a common step in video post-production workflows to prepare media for client approval or generate multiple delivery formats for distribution.

This post is an exercise in using Lambda to glue together resources—dropping a file into an S3 bucket will kick off a transcoding job using the Zencoder API, which will send the resultant files back to S3. This method could be further adapted to automate other steps in your workflow; for example, performing additional actions on the transcoded files (such as generating push notifications or moving the files to a CDN).

If you’re a developer and already comfortable with AWS, you may want to jump straight to the Lambda function in Step 3, or just grab the example code from GitHub and get up and running yourself.

Why Transcode in the Cloud?

Watch folders are supported by common encoders such as Adobe Media Encoder, Telestream, and Sorenson Squeeze. For small-scale encoding, licensing Sorenson or Adobe products may not be cost effective, and for a high volume of content, configuring and maintaining a fleet of encoding servers could be expensive and time-consuming.

The tools we’ll use (Zencoder, S3, and Lambda) are inexpensive and charge on a per-use basis with no upfront costs or minimums, so our watch folder will be cost-efficient for both small- and large-scale loads. At $0.03/GB for S3 storage and $0.05/min of transcoded output from Zencoder (as low as $0.02 at high volumes), you can estimate your usage easily. Since the output files will be written to S3, they are immediately available for web distribution.

How Does It Work?

Our watch folder will live inside an Amazon S3 bucket. Uploading a file to the bucket will trigger our Lambda function, which composes and submits a request to the Zencoder API to create an encoding job. Zencoder will retrieve the file from S3, transcode it to the output formats that we’ll define, and then drop the transcoded files back into S3. From there, they can be distributed to your clients, or even delivered directly to end-users via CloudFront or another CDN.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial, you will need an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account and a Zencoder account. The free tiers of both services will suffice for demonstration purposes, though you’ll only have 5GB of S3 storage, and Zencoder will truncate outputs to 5 seconds.

Step 1: Set Up an S3 Bucket

First, we’ll need to set up the watch folder on S3. If you don’t already have an S3 bucket set up, log in to the AWS console and navigate to the S3 service. Click “Create Bucket” and give it a name. Bucket names are unique across the entire service, so it helps to use a unique prefix, like your name or company name.

Leave the region as US Standard, which is the same as Zencoder’s default region. This prevents incurring S3 transfer charges when Zencoder retrieves your files. If you need to use a bucket in a different region, you can add the “region” parameter to the Zencoder job to ensure that the transcode is run in the same region.

Create two folders in your S3 bucket—one for the files you’ll upload, and one to which Zencoder will upload the transcoded files. I’ve simply used inputs/ and outputs/.

Step 2: Give Zencoder Access to the S3 Bucket

There are two ways to grant Zencoder access to read and write files to your S3 bucket. The simplest way is to add a policy to your S3 bucket granting Zencoder’s IAM user access to the bucket.

In the Properties pane for the S3 bucket, click on Permissions, and then Add Bucket Policy. Paste in Zencoder’s bucket policy (available in this Github repo), replacing both instances of YOUR-BUCKET, with the actual bucket name specified in Step 1.

The other option to grant Zencoder access to your bucket is to create an IAM user with an AmazonS3FullAccess policy (or restrict it to this bucket), and then add that user’s Access Key ID and Secret Access Key to the Credentials section of your Zencoder account.

Step 3: Create the Lambda Function

From the AWS console, click on the Lambda service. Click on Create a Lambda Function (or Get Started, if this is your first time using Lambda). Skip the blueprint step, and you’ll see the Configure Function screen. Give your function a name (i.e. “transcode Video”) and select Python 2.7 as the runtime.

Paste the example code into the Lambda function code section. You’ll need to edit some of the global vars at the top—set the API\_KEY to your Zencoder Full Access API key, change the INPUT\_FOLDER\_NAME to match the name of the watch folder you created in S3, change the S3\_OUTPUT\_BASE\_URL to the bucket and folder name where you would like the output files stored, and set the NOTIFICATION\_EMAIL to an email address where you’d like to receive notifications from Zencoder (if you don’t want notifications, just omit line 39 of the Lambda function).

About the code in lambda\_function.py—essentially, we’re grabbing the name of the file that was uploaded to S3 and using it as the basis of the output filename. The api\_data object is the job that will be sent to Zencoder, with all of the outputs and encoding parameters defined. You can modify this to suit your needs, and Zencoder provides several templates in their Request Builder. Then we’re submitting the job to the Zencoder API endpoint and logging the response.

Next, select S3 Execution Role under the Create New Role heading. You may need to enable popups in your browser to see the creation screen, which prompts you to name the new role and click Allow. This role defines the permissions scheme that the Lambda function will run under—in this case, we’re granting Lambda access to the S3 bucket. Back on the Lambda screen, the new role you created should now be selected in the Role field.

Increase the timeout to 10 seconds. In practice, the function will rarely take more than 1500ms seconds to run, but our function will be more resilient if it can wait a few extra seconds in case of a slow API response. Lambda charges for every 100ms of function run time, so we won’t set it too high. Click Next, and then Create Function. On the Event Sources tab, add an event source. Select S3 as the type, choose the S3 bucket from Step 1, and set the Event type to Object Created (All).

In the Prefix field, enter the name of the watch folder you created in the S3 bucket (e.g. inputs/). This will ensure the Lambda function is only triggered when files are added to that folder, and not elsewhere in the bucket—and most importantly, this will also prevent our output files from triggering more encoding jobs in an endless loop. Check Enable event source and submit.

That’s It

We’ve got an S3 bucket with a watch folder and we’ve got a Lambda function that receives file creation events from that watch folder, which forms a Zencoder job to transcode those files and drop them back into our output folder. Upload some media to your watch folder to see it in action.

If you need to troubleshoot, check the AWS CloudWatch logs for details of each call to your Lambda function. Zencoder’s Jobs view also provides details of each job and any errors that may have been thrown.

HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LANDING PAGES FOR LEAD FORM CONVERSION

bsp-admin-1 on September 29, 2016

Marketers are always looking to new trends to give them an edge. While video certainly isn’t new to the scene, marketers are finding more and more ways to use it for a competitive edge. Whether its used for live streaming events, announcing product releases via social, or even training videos on the enterprise intranet, video is ubiquitous and its positive impact on your business only stands to grow.

As a digital campaign manager, I am always thinking: optimize, optimize, optimize. There are mornings that I wake up recalling how I dreamt about optimizing our content, our banner ads, and our nurture campaigns. Some of us eat, sleep, and drink our profession. Am I right?

The performance of a landing page can be tricky. This is yet another challenge I take on. Any optimization project always starts with a lot of questions. Sometimes that means just deciding how you’ll test a landing page’s success. Could it be time spent on page? Amount of clicks? Conversions? Video views? Number of return visitors? There are many different elements that one could use to track success metrics but, at the end of the day, most of us (myself included) base our success on conversions, i.e. form fills.

Let’s talk about some of the ways that we have tested our landing page elements and the outcomes.

Adding a Video Teaser on Landing Pages

We recently did a test by adding a video teaser on our landing page before form submission. We thought that this could be risky because people would watch the video and forget to submit the form. But this wasn’t the case. Below you will see the two landing pages that we tested in our SEM channel. Both landing pages had about the same larger volume of impressions, but the video landing page was the clear winner.

This landing page had a higher click-through rate by only about 1%, but the conversion rate was remarkable. As shown below, the video focused landing page had about a 4% conversion rate as opposed to a 1% conversion rate with the landing page to the right.

Through testing, we have found that video on landing pages is effective and lifts conversion rates.

A landing page without videoA landing page with video

Reducing the Length of Page Copy

This might seem like an obvious one, but how much copy you have on your landing page can really affect the success of your conversion rates. If you’re marketing to marketers like I am, you recognize that our audience is a multi-tasking, easily distracted group! But really, everyone is short on time! We don’t have the time to read a page full of marketing-heavy copy BEFORE the form and BEFORE the actual asset. In the above examples where we also tested video, we also decreased the copy of the landing page. Since we couldn’t be sure that this wasn’t affected by our use of video, we tested some more. (Optimize, optimize, optimize!) We’ve decreased text on multiple campaigns like email and banner ads. We’ve found this to be extremely effective thus far.

Altering CTA Buttons Language

Our marketing team, and probably yours too, is always looking for ways to spin campaign copy from dull and data driven to witty and clever. Themes and trends are often incorporated into strategy but we found we needed to stick to CTA best practices, keeping the copy short and to the point. We tested several different types, here are a couple of examples:

Download the Guide vs. Snag the Secrets. Download the Guide saw a conversion rate of 2.5% where the wittier CTA saw a conversion rate of 2.2%.

Read the Report vs. Download the White Paper. Read the report saw a conversion rate of 3% where download the white paper had a 6% conversion.

Landing Page Form CTA Button ALanding Page form CTA Button B

Shifting Placement of Video Lead Forms

We recently tested a standard form vs landing page with an in-video form. The Brightcove player gives the ability to place a lead form in the beginning, middle, and end of a video. We tested a teaser video on a landing page with a form on the right side of the page, like below and we also tested the teaser video with the form at the end of the video.

In-Video Lead Form

Within one month of this test, we had a clear winner. An in-video form is not as successful for short videos that are less than two minutes in duration. Interestingly enough, we have learned through multiple tests with in-video forms that people will fill out a form if the video is at least 20 minutes. Full demo videos, conference sessions, documentaries warrant an in-video form. When people are paying to see or attend a session or are receiving educational content then they will take that extra step to fill out a form. But for a one-minute video teaser, this is not the best practice, so keep the form to a side bar.

So, what are the key take aways in optimizing your landing page?

  • Use video teasers to draw interest and communicate more information in limited space.
  • Less is more; reduce the total page copy.
  • Place forms on the right-hand side for optimal results.
  • Keep things simple. Make your forms short and your CTAs in direct, conventional language.

HOW INTERNAL VIDEO BRINGS COMPANIES CLOSER TOGETHER

bsp-admin-1 on September 28, 2016

Video is a highly effective internal communication tool—an ideal way to deliver messages across an organization in seconds. It has proven especially valuable for boosting employee engagement. In fact, 54% of human resources communications professionals report that employees expect video communications from their organization. When organizations use video to boost morale, they can enjoy significant benefits.

Advantages of Employee Motivation Videos

  • Higher productivity and profitability
  • Lower turnover and absenteeism
  • Improved relationships and team building

WHY VIDEOS ARE AN EXCELLENT CORPORATE COMMUNICATION TOOL

Video is a natural medium for communication and learning, combining sound, visuals, and motion to capture attention. Employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than to read an email, document, or web article. Videos foster a stronger sense of connection and inspire employees to take the desired action.

Advantages of Videos for Internal Communications

  • Speed: Videos can convey information in seconds or minutes, often replacing lengthy written content.
  • Time savings: Videos ensure everyone is on the same page, eliminating the need for costly in-person meetings or long email threads.
  • Easy access: Videos are accessible on a variety of devices, including desktops and mobile phones, and can be replayed as needed. Notably, 35% of employees stream video messages on their mobile devices.

EFFECTIVE TYPES OF VIDEOS FOR INTERNAL MESSAGING

Videos are an excellent way to break important news, foster personal connections, and ensure consistency across offices and teams. Consider these types of videos for corporate communications:

  • Corporate news: Interview-style videos are ideal for clearly explaining changes or new initiatives. They keep employees informed about shifts in direction, structure, or strategy, addressing questions in advance to prevent misunderstandings.
  • Event recaps: Videos highlighting employee events, such as award ceremonies, team outings, or annual celebrations, boost morale and foster a sense of community. Recap videos allow employees to relive the spirit of the occasion.
  • Executive messages: Short video interviews with the CEO or other executives help create a closer connection between management and staff. Videos that showcase company leadership promote loyalty, boost morale, and foster transparency. Executives can discuss performance updates, team achievements, event news, new policies, or market changes.

CREATE THOUGHT-PROVOKING EMPLOYEE COMMUNICATIONS

The benefits of an internal video program are clear: Video messages save time and resources while increasing understanding and transparency. They also contribute to a more connected and motivated workforce.

Ask yourself whether every memo, leadership email, or internal newsletter could be replaced with a video. Once you find the inspiration, focus on one type of message to start. Coordinate with your video team, plan upcoming content on a calendar, and schedule speakers and resources. With these steps, you’ll be well on your way to effectively boosting employee motivation and satisfaction.

We distribute videos that make the value of the brand provided by the company your own, with the aim of promoting inner branding.

bsp-admin-1 on September 26, 2016

WE WANT OUR EMPLOYEES TO EMBODY THE ORIX BRAND.

ORIX was founded in 1964. Starting out in the leasing business, the company has expanded into related fields. Today, it has a major presence in a variety of fields, including finance, maintenance leasing, and real estate. The company is not only involved in business for corporations, but is also familiar to us through its management of a professional baseball team, operation of an aquarium, and car rental services.


The company’s founding management philosophy of “standing on one’s own feet” and “creating new value” has been shared within the company. Employees working under this management philosophy have a strong spirit of challenge, and the company has grown significantly. With over 30,000 employees now working for the company, in order to achieve further growth, it is necessary for all employees to share and put into practice the value that the company wants its customers and society to feel = the value of the brand that the company provides.


Takahiro Otsuka, a senior member of the Advertising Team in the Group Public Relations Department, says, “The purpose of internal branding is to gain recognition, understanding and empathy for the value of the ORIX brand that we want our customers and society to feel, and to encourage action. We started using videos to make it easier for people to understand what makes us good and what kind of value we provide to the world, and to make it their own. Ultimately, we want all of our employees to embody the ORIX brand and work with enthusiasm, and we are working with the aim of delivering the good points of ORIX to the world through our employees.


The company’s value proposition is expressed in terms such as “solid trust,” “diverse awareness,” and “fresh comfort. However, it is difficult to imagine these values in terms of one’s own work using words alone. With video, you can introduce scenes where you have gained the trust of customers or episodes that have arisen in the context of new business, and you can connect these to the values you provide.

THE PEACE OF MIND OF BRIGHTCOVE VIDEO CLOUD

As a company that started out in finance, we are strict about how we handle information. Brightcove Video Cloud gave us peace of mind in terms of security too.

Takahiro Otsuka
Senior Manager, Advertising Team, Group Public Relations Department, ORIX Corporation

Until then, ORIX had been involved in initiatives such as uploading TV commercials and video messages for internal use to the company website and internal portal, but they had not produced any video content for internal branding. In April 2018, the decision was made to start a full-scale video initiative, and production began.

However, there were concerns about distribution. It was predicted that multiple problems would occur with the existing infrastructure. For example, at the time, when viewing videos from the company portal, it took several seconds from clicking the play button to the video actually starting to play. In order to ensure that as many employees as possible could watch the videos without stress or dropping out, this part of the system needed to be improved. For videos that would be shown to all employees, it was necessary to work with the IT department to consider the network load on the company’s internal network. This is why the company decided to select a video platform.

Mr. Otsuka says, “In addition to the technical requirements, it was essential to have a function that could analyze viewing conditions. We will continue to produce videos based on an annual plan. In order to continue to produce content that is easy to understand and watch, we needed a system that would allow us to review the points at which viewers drop out in detail and apply the results to future productions.”

After considering several video platforms, the company adopted Brightcove Video Cloud. Network load can be addressed with the control function, which finely controls the traffic allocated to videos. Tests have proven that the waiting time until playback is reduced to one-fifth of the previous time. Detailed viewing status can also be analyzed. The company also evaluated the fact that ORIX Life Insurance, a member of the ORIX Group, had already had success using it as a product education tool for its agents. “Since we started our business in the financial sector, we are strict about handling information. We were also reassured by the security aspects of Brightcove Video Cloud” (Otsuka).

Brightcove Video Cloud went live in October 2018. In addition to the videos produced from April, all the videos that had been published previously were also registered and distribution began through the company portal. We were also able to securely publish videos on multiple portals, such as the internal company newsletter, which can be accessed by employees’ families and alumni, and the internal portal of a group company that had just joined the group and whose systems had not yet been integrated. In January 2019, we published a video of the CEO’s New Year’s message. We were also able to increase the number of group companies that directly share the top management’s thoughts through videos.

INCREASING ENGAGEMENT SCORES

At present, there are 65 videos available, including those on the corporate website as well as those for internal branding. The company has prepared content that helps employees understand and empathize with the value provided, as well as content that conveys the various business scenes of the group from an employee’s perspective with a strong sense of realism. The former is intended to help employees reaffirm their basic stance by watching it regularly, while the latter can be seen as a practical version of that. The company group regularly transfers employees between companies, and the ability to make proposals that bring together the strengths of the group is also one of the company’s strengths. For this reason, it is also popular with employees who want to know about the various businesses being conducted by the group companies.

When analyzing viewing trends, they found it convenient to be able to use an index called the “engagement score”. This is a system that calculates a video’s score based on multiple KPIs, such as video length and number of views. They have published three case study videos so far, and the first scored 42 points. By analyzing it in more depth and resolving multiple issues, they were able to raise the score of the third video to 65 points.

The completion of the video platform is becoming known within the company, and we are currently making arrangements so that all the videos that are being managed separately by each person in the department can be uploaded to Brightcove Video Cloud. Once the content has been consolidated, we will be able to use Brightcove Social to publish videos internally, externally, and on social media, with secure and thorough license management.

The project is only just beginning. At the moment, we are in the process of figuring out what things are better communicated through video, and what things must be communicated through video. In this process, the CEO’s New Year’s message was a hint for us.

Mr. Otsuka said, “The message was that the ORIX Group must continue to create innovation at all levels. In response to this, I understood that it was important to present guidelines for thinking and action, as well as to build relationships that allow people to learn about the work of other departments through internal branding. The value we provide is exactly what provides guidelines for thinking and action. I would like to prepare a variety of content that people need to see and that will be useful for their work, and I would also like to think about ways to encourage employees to participate, such as by distributing videos with a sense of realism and inviting people to post videos.

BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIAL VIDEO: USING TWITTER FOR BUSINESS

bsp-admin-1 on September 22, 2016

If you’re a marketer, you use Twitter to read industry news, monitor competitors, and respond to customers. Yet, we struggle to craft, amplify, and track our messages. Beyond building a community, social network publishing updates can throw us for a loop. Remember when photos were released for tweets?

Now, social video is the next big thing: 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter. This popularity is hardly surprising when we consider that it’s short, visually-oriented communication. Let’s explore more how to better use social video Twitter to communicate the values of your brand.

Why Twitter Social Video Matters

Each social media network has its strengths. For marketers, Twitter and LinkedIn feel more professional than other social media forums, which is particularly important if you’re a B2B marketer. In fact, 65.8% of US companies with 100+ employees use Twitter for marketing.

Twitter wants to be a source of information that matters with live breaking news via trending hashtags and a “while you were out” section feeding you updates from the brands you interact with most. You can capitalize on these hyper-personalized algorithms by using a social video strategy that embraces both organic and paid strategies for building audiences and increasing engagement.

On Twitter, brands aren’t there to just push their messages, they’re also there to listen. Twitter is a great support vehicle: 77% of Twitter users feel more positive about a brand when their Tweet has been replied to. These types of interactions are expected at 140 characters. Twitter is a network that thrives on brevity and real-time. Craft social video messages that speak to these consumption habits.

Social video on Twitter Engagement Infographic
Source: Sprout Social

How to Tell Better Stories with Twitter Social Video

Social video is the best way to educate and inform potential prospects, succinctly, but you need to know your audience. Twitter skews slightly more male, and the audience is relatively young, in the 18-to-29 age range followed closely by 30-to-49. The older population isn’t on Twitter, with only 13% of internet users in the 50-64 range using Twitter. This population shrinks to 6% for those in the 65+ age range.

The Twitter audience is also more educated and residing in slightly more urban environments. So depending on the type of video content you’re posting to Twitter, this information could give you an advantage.

So what kind of content should you be creating? As always, the way you use video can differ, based on your goals. Commercials or brand stories that promote and educate can do well here, as Twitter is very well suited to awareness and engagement. Don’t forget, Twitter operates on the recency paradox, so newsjacking and live tweeting are options to explore.

What Kind of Video Content to Create for Twitter

At the engagement stage, we want to converse and create a two-way dialogue. Social videos like an explainers, tip series, or how-to’s are perfect types of content that extend goodwill and build rapport. Also, consider creating product or service-specific content like demos, Q&A sessions, customer testimonials, and customer reviews. Video at this stage should highlight your solution but should also allow your viewer to share in the excitement, relief, or satisfaction felt after purchasing.

Social video on Twitter hits on the gray area between engagement and conversion. They might choose to engage with more of your content or experience it on your site. The experience you create will differ as a result.

In a “soft conversion,” you want to get them to the site, to a branded experience you can control and then supplement your video content with accompanying content that keeps them entertained. To do this, we can go back to an old standard of placing static images with play buttons like we do in emails, soliciting a click.

Lastly, Twitter is a great channel to listen and connect with customers. But you need to ask yourself, what kind of content will keep making them choose you over others?

So even if you’re just getting started with video, dedicate some resources to a retention campaign. Enhance their experience and make it super easy for them to use your product or solution. To do this, videos should center on related products—potentially how to use these products together, a tips series, or exciting company news like a feature or product launch.

How to Optimize Social Video on Twitter

Twitter Video
Counts as viewClick to play
Autoplay default?Yes
Autoloop?No
Audio state defaultOn
Maximum length140 seconds (00:02:20)
Public view counts?No
Metrics dashboard?Advertisers only
Favors native video?Yes

 

Upload Native Video

Just like Facebook, Twitter favors native video. In fact, native video on Twitter drives more engagement, including 2.5x more replies, 2.8x more retweets, and 1.9x more favorites than third-party players.

Optimize for Autoplay

Like Facebook, native videos autoplay on Twitter. So you need to have an optimized video lead-in that doesn’t waste time and is interesting whether the sound is on or off.

Twitter expanded the allowed length of videos from 30 seconds to 140 seconds, approximately 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Professional publishers, however, can utilize up to 10 minutes. But it’s highly unlikely in a feed swimming with content that a user is going to stay on your video for 10 minutes. On Twitter, 80% of users will watch a full video if it’s 30 seconds or less.

Utilize Copy Appropriately

Words that act as cues for content aid in attention, retention, and the ability to consume with no sound. Consider text within your video. These words and phrases can move dynamically and create visual interest. Also, optimize the copy surrounding your video as some viewers disable autoplay in their feeds, so you need to solicit a click. Draw interest and set the stage for what videos are about to be consumed.

Leverage Unique Hashtags

Utilize the unique attributes of Twitter. If you’re using social video on Twitter, host twitter chats, or public conversations. Individual tweets are linked through a hashtag and publicly searchable.

Remember, using mentions (@username) when posting a video are going to help get you attention from influencers. When responding within a chat, create a quick social video and keep the conversation going in an intimate and personal way.

Video works because it is naturally persuasive. Social video overcomes objections or a hesitancy to interact with the brand when paired with a specific cadence of communication. Twitter’s rapid-fire, short-form communications are curated by audiences who gravitate toward the brands that speak to them, craving real-time interactions.

HOW CISCO IS LEADING DIGITAL MARKETING WITH VIDEO

bsp-admin-1 on September 19, 2016

Anyone can find basic solutions to run videos on their web site, but few can operate, innovate and unlock its value at scale. At Cisco, users across the globe in departments as diverse as Marketing, Corporate Affairs, Investor Relations, and Support, are creating, uploading, and measuring video content. Cisco hosts 200 new uploads each month across 753 unique publishers located around the world.

And the videos are impactful: In FY2016, we had 58 million impressions, 4.9 million views, and over 258,000 hours of engagement.

Here is how we got there.

First, our goal is to enable—not control. Cisco is a globally distributed corporation and we recognize that it is impossible to centralize control of video. In fact, trying to control the creation and distribution of video would slow its adoption. We make the process as transparent and easy as possible, and that means integrating with the right tools. We also work with internal teams to establish rules for uploading videos to ensure compliance with brand guidelines and governance.

Six Critical Tools To Optimize the Adoption and Success of Video

These six tools have lowered the barrier to entry and optimized Cisco’s video initiatives.

1. Web Analytics

Integrating your video platform with your organization’s web analytics platform is the most critical tool for measuring ROI. You can track the viewer visits to the website, what they clicked on, where they went next in the website, and what they did during their visit.

This data helps structure the engagement based on how much of the video they viewed. It also helps producers decide where and how to focus their video production investments for new launches and campaigns.

2. Marketing Automation Platforms

The integration of your video and marketing automation platforms provides greater insight into a prospect’s level of interest. It identifies who specifically clicked on a video, how they accessed the video, how many times they viewed it and how much of it they watched. For direct marketing campaigns, you can identify viewers by name, providing account managers with a more complete picture of the customer or prospect’s engagement.

3. Big Data and Data Visualization systems

These enable you to combine video data sources, web logs, offer management systems, and CRM into a visually intuitive performance dashboard. Video publishers can visualize the omni-channel performance.

4. Search/Content Libraries

Leverage video platform APIs to index video assets and make it easy to search for video content. This also helps keep the asset library organized so publishers do not reproduce content or duplicate an upload. This goes for Corporate and Partner marketing organizations.

5. Web CMS and Communities

Creating video components and listing standardized embed codes for various usage is key to simplify web publishing operations and adoption.

6. Video Platform Technology partners

We integrated our video platform with innovative technology partners to improve global usability and reduce costs. Some of the key capabilities that are making an impact at Cisco are:

  • Caption authoring has saved our globalization team 50% year over year. We no longer have to localize files in multiple languages and host multiple assets.
  • Interactive video capabilities enable us to deliver relevant offers to viewers and increase response and revenue. This is the foundation for ROI for demand generation programs offering video.
  • Global self-publishing system enables anyone at the company to effortlessly upload and categorize their video assets to the online video system and YouTube, reducing the publishing time from 5 days to 1 hour.

Engagement, Response, Revenue: The Only Meaningful KPIs

Metrics influence what you need to produce, what you’re going to deliver, and what you’re measured against within your company. The number of video views is the most frequently discussed metric, but video views only measure how successfully you promoted the video. True ROI comes when viewers reveal themselves, become leads, and ultimately result in conversion, bookings, and revenue.

Our key metrics at Cisco:

  • The % of video viewed. That is a measure of the content engagement itself. Is the video content compelling enough for people to keep watching? Overall, our video viewers consume 10% of the total messaging opportunity across all assets.

  • Click-through rate from the call to action. Is the CTA engaging enough? How many viewers who clicked through were registered?  How many identified themselves? How many were new contacts? These metrics enable publishers to relate the cost of video production to the cost of getting a new contact and ultimately to the amount of revenue that came as a result of the video. Current Call-to-Action click-through rate averages around 7%

Bottom line is to be smart about how you create and measure video. The goal is to drive business value.

OPTIMIZING YOUR OTT VIDEO PLATFORM STRATEGY

bsp-admin-1 on September 7, 2016

How do you reach viewers across the ever increasing and fragmented device landscape including web, mobile, and connected TV devices? How do you maximize audience growth and engagement on the platforms that matter for your business?

Let’s take a closer look at how to address some of these questions we’ve heard from our customers about launching an OTT service.

REACHING AND ENGAGING YOUR VIEWERS

When it comes to developing a platform strategy, more is not necessarily better and one size doesn’t necessarily fit all. Factors that you will want to consider when evaluating which platforms to prioritize for your OTT service include:

  • Target audience demographics. What devices are used to consume content by your targeted viewers? By region? By age?
  • Content type (Long form/short form). Is your content best suited for a lean forward (web/mobile) or lean backward (connected TV) experience? Both?
  • Cost of platform specific development. Developing apps for each platform can be expensive and difficult to maintain. Device manufacturers are not able to keep up with the evolving OS platforms resulting in a fragmented landscape. How many versions of Android will you need to maintain support for?
  • Monetization effectiveness. For your content and monetization objectives (AVOD and/or SVOD), are you choosing the right platforms?

There are a number of studies and reports that can assist you in better understanding your target audience, content effectiveness across platforms, and monetization by platform and service. For example, a PayWizard Survey found that Mobile devices are the most popular options for watching paid OTT TV content. Or FreeWheel’s Video Monetization Report indicates 63% of monetization is now occurring outside of Desktop environments.

TEST AND MEASURE

Getting your apps on your target platforms is just the beginning. How do you measure success? Are you maximizing the value of your content? Are you keeping your viewers engaged?

Measuring app downloads and app store ratings will help you understand your effectiveness in converting interested users into engaged users. Video and app analytics will help you take the next step in understanding how and where your content is being consumed, how your apps are behaving on each platform, and monetization effectiveness.

Do you want to know what the most popular content is on an iPhone, on a Saturday, in London? Is application load time resulting in user churn? Are users exiting at the first ad?

Taking this a step further, multivariate testing is a critical tool for optimizing your content and app design across your demographic profiles and until recently has been a rare utility. We’re very excited to have added this capability to our OTT Flow offering.

ABILITY TO ADAPT

Understanding viewer behavior will help you maximize viewer engagement and optimize your OTT apps to deliver the best user experience. However, this task raises additional questions.

What are the right updates to make? Do the updates apply to everyone or specific demographics or regions? Do I need to submit my apps for app store approval each time?

When taking your content over the top you are choosing to extend the reach of your content. This should be a calculated decision that allows you to get the most out of your content.

Brightcove OTT Flow, powered by Accedo, is designed to maximize your market opportunity, and enable you to do so without starting out in a financial hole. OTT Flow’s application management console enables you to get to your targeted platforms easily, is managed from an extensible, centralized console that enables you to support new devices quickly, and allows you to publish app updates without requiring the re-submission of your apps for app store approval.

OTT Flow ties this all together with rich analytics that help you measure content usage, QoE, and application level metrics at a glance and with the ability to drill down on specific titles, players, apps, and regions.