First, let’s make something clear. We (by we, I mean your audience) WANT to share your video content. We share interesting, funny and moving content every day. Through social networks, or a simple text message. We share because it helps us connect with the people we love. We share because it builds our professional standing with blog tips and how-tos to our colleagues. Social networks have made us all tastemakers, curators and the centers of our own personal networks.
So your audience wants content to share, you have content you want shared. What's holding you back from viral video domination?
If you read content marketing blogs, you know that longer articles (1000 words+) get more shares than their word challenged friends. So you'd think the same goes for video right?
Not quite. The average length of the most shared videos on Facebook is just under 1 minute. With the amount of shares a video gets declining after this mark.
So where does this leave your magnus opus clocking in at 56 minutes? In pole position, that's where! If 1 minute snack-sized videos are king, you've got 56 snackables to fill your audience's hunger for content.
Easy to say, harder in practice to choose which clips to use. Unless you can get someone to do it for you...
You can't just randomly snackify your videos, and manual editing is time consuming. What's a content owner supposed to do?
Get your audience to select the best clips for you.
We transcribed and summarized our video audio into text snippets (btw hello SEO!). Giving us lots of options to A/B test. Then we placed the text of these beside our long form video, timed to appear when spoken.
Seeing which messages in the video our audience responds to, we can find the best clips they want to share.
PS. If that still sounds like a bit of a mission, it was. We did this all manually at first and then automated it with Hubbub (our video solution for content owners).
Before you go running off sharing your freshly baked video snacks like confetti, you’ve got a golden opportunity on your original video.
As much as your audience loves sharing video snippets, they also love sharing punchy messages. You’ve probably done it too - remember that conference you went to? When that keynote speaker uttered that perfect soundbite you tweeted out to your network? With an audio summary displaying key messages next to your video, you’re now delivering that to your viewers.
We add a ’Share this’ button underneath these messages and BOOM! Our longer on-site videos are now supercharged for viewer sharing, and we have a stack of snack-size clips.
In marketing, sometimes we obsess about raising our conversion on actions like sharing too much.
For your on-site content, don't give viewers 50 different social platform options to share it on. Providing more choice often decreases action as your audience has to think. Don't make them work to help you.
By changing our call-to-action to 'Share this on Facebook' we doubled viewers sharing content.
But which social platform to choose? That depends on your audience and content subject. Looking at your current site analytics will lead the way. If your audience favors a certain network (Facebook, Twitter or otherwise), lead with it.
We've consistently achieved at least 5x increases on sharing with the above tactics. With virality kicking in as the audience grows from the original viewer shares.
When new viewers arrive, adding a welcome message keeps the ball rolling. Imagine this page greeting you with "Shane Herft shared this with you" (or the name of a connection you follow). Viewers who get a message like this are more connected to your content and more likely to keep kicking your can down the road.
Want to see if these tactics can work for you? Get a free trial of Hubbub, our video solution that automates these tricks for you.
