Who Should Take Care of your Social Media?

Your new company is looking to expand to the next level with your online presence. Social media is a necessity of any online PR efforts so you want to start there. However, you’re unsure whether to handle it yourself or hire a firm to post, tweet and reply. On the one hand you’re the best person to represent the company you love, but others have way more expertise than you do. To help, here’s a breakdown of your options.

In-House

Keeping social media administration within the company comes with its own benefits. For one, a trained worker in your company is more likely to have specific knowledge of your product or service. This provides them with an edge to come up with a strategy that could be more tailored to your special needs.

Also, you’re guaranteed that an in-house social media administrator will spend their time on your business and your business alone. A social media/PR agency or professional will have several clients to dedicate their time to and thus possibly missing an opportunity someone wholly dedicated to your company might not.

Agency

A social media/PR agency will most likely have a professionally trained staff that is used to working in the specific and often quirky world of social media. The agents will be more attuned to the ins and outs of the business and may have solutions your in-house worker might not know exist.

You also might benefit from the environment they work in. If a strange issue arises, an agent can consult with the many peers at the agency to solve it. If it’s an established agency, they most likely have a database of past successes and can pull from that to best help your company.

On top of that, there’s a degree of separation that could come in handy, especially during a crisis. If your business receives negative press, someone associated with your company may get upset and do something drastic. A third party organization like a PR agency should handle it with no emotions attached.

Social Media Consultant

While not possessing the resources of an agency, a contracted social media consultant will most likely be able to dedicate more time to your company. While agents may be assigned public relations work as well as social media assignments (people assume they’re the same, but they’re quite different), a contracted social media expert works solely in this field.

As they already work with sites like Facebook and Twitter, they probably have many colleagues they consult with to get fresh ideas on how to best boost your company. With this, they tend to be a combination of an agency with an in-house worker.

That “degree of separation” the agency has may also come into play here, but potentially not as pronounced. Since the consultant’s client list will be smaller, they may take things as personally as you do when a customer complains or insults the company. However, if they’re doing their job correctly, this won’t happen.

Which option would work best for your business?

By Mickie Kennedy, founder and president of eReleases, the online leader in affordable PR distribution since 1998. Download the free whitepaper LinkedIn for Business, a must-read for the well-networked PR professional. Follow eReleases on Google+, Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

Social Media Micro-Film Wars: Instagram vs Vine

Just as you think you are keeping up with the social media trends and just as you get your workings in order everything changes again!

I don’t know if you have noticed but Twitter has had this thing called “Vine” for a while now where you can take short videos of up to 7 seconds and share them with your followers (I was just about to type friends) on Twitter as well as embedding them on other social media. Vine was initially on iOS but arrived on Android 4.0 and above on June 3 and wow did it take off! Being that the video can only be up to 7 seconds long means that you could only share a brief “moment” with your friends, just to say a little more than what a picture would.

Thing is though, this was only for Twitter, so Facebook was losing out, and fast! So Facebook who owned Instagram decided to get on the bandwagon and added video to their app a few days later, and well...that stole the market back, plus more! Instagram was out there before Vine, so all those Instagram users that used Vine because of Instagram’s lack of video was immediately ‘stolen’ back. So not only has Instagram’s popularity increased, but they have also pinched almost half of Vine’s users.

So where am I going with this? You remember I said that you could embed these videos just like what you would do with a YouTube video right? I believe that the popularity of these Micro-Film apps should be used by businesses and web designers to enhance the user experience and business exposure to customers. Businesses nowadays all have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, now it is time to expand into the Micro-Film network. Creative web designers can incorporate videos of your Instagram/Vine account onto your website to enhance the user experience. I can already see this being used in retail websites where the product as a brief 7-10 second advert just to show how the product looks, fits or works in real life. This would dramatically increase consumer confidence in the advertised product!

Which should you choose?

Ideally you should choose both! Reason for that is simple; you don’t want to alienate any of your users due to a lack of compatibility. However, looking at current statistics there is an overwhelming agreement that Instagram is clobbering Vine.

After conducting some research it was clear that Instagram is outgunning Vine, which would make sense that if you really felt compelled to go for just one, then you should choose Instagram as it is by far the most popular. However let’s not forget that little rise at the end of Vine’s trend-line; there is still a lot that could happen.

Next Steps?

I think we can all agree that the Micro-Film industry has a big future. We saw this with Twitter and Facebook when the two giants started battling for social network supremacy (and still are); we can only expect the same to happen with these two ‘newcomers’ even with Instagram’s big head start.
Web video production will be playing an ever greater role in how we approach web design. User experience with internet speeds are also getting faster and everyone having access to social media and websites via smartphones, tablets and computers. So it would only make sense that the website development industry ‘upgrades’ as well, or should I say ‘modernise!’

Youtube Video Optimization Tips for Google Searches

Youtube Optimization Elements

It goes without saying that the internet is evolving at an immeasurable rate. As a Video Producer turned Internet Marketer, I wholeheartedly believe that a compelling video with the correct sales tactics and calls to action can produce more substantial results than any other form of online media. Unfortunately, the best video in the world won’t generate new business if nobody sees it.

With the correct on-page optimization tactics, a Youtube video can rank on the top of Google and Youtube searches. There are many additional variables that I will not be able to touch on today, but a well-produced video that has good on-page SEO will usually produce amazing results without having to worry about channel authority, marketing or linking tactics.

Before Uploading Your Video File

A little bit of planning can go a long way. The very first thing that you should do is “keyword research.” There are several softwares and websites that have keyword research tools. Although I use several tools and software for SEO, the keyword research tool that I prefer is Wordtracker.

After using your preferred keyword research tool, hopefully, you find the perfect keyword. A keyword that is closely related to your content, with high search volume and low competition is what you are looking for. The metrics can vary drastically depending on your subject, but the insight that keyword research can provide is nearly priceless.

Once you have chosen your “focus keyword” rename your video file with it. For instance, your keyword is “Caribbean Travel Tips 2013” rename your file and keep the same extension. Your video file would be renamed as “caribbean-travel-tips-2013.mp4” or .mov, .avi, etc.

Title

Your video’s title is the single most important onsite SEO element. Make sure to keep it between 40 and 67 characters and include your focus keyword. For instance, I would update the title while the video is uploading to become “Mike's Caribbean Travel Tips 2013 | Fleetfoot Marketing”

I like to use this SEO Character Counter page to help make my titles quickly.

At this point, you can remove the extension. Your title does not need the ,mp4, .mov, .avi, or whatever other extension it may have.

Description

A full description is important for the search engines to be able to find and rank your video properly, so don’t get lazy on this part. A good description should be at least 300 words. I have seen other authorities recommend 500-700 words, but I have found 300 do be sufficient.

Make sure to include your keyword as the very first item, followed by a link to your website, social media, or whatever other place you would like your viewers to visit. Your page will have a little extra juice if there is an outbound link with the keyword in it, such as http://examplesite.com/caribbean-travel-tips-2013 but only do this if you actually have a real page to link to or your video may get penalized.

Very few people will actually read the description, but it is important not to overuse your keyword. This article from SEO Braintrust explains what not to do when writing a description. My suggestion is to simply transpose the video. This should produce a description that is relevant to the video, and includes related keywords.

Tags

Tags are fairly easy. If you want to get a good idea of some tags to use, do a search on Youtube of your focus keyword and look at the tags on the top-three videos. Use the ones that are related to your video, as well as a couple of your own. Don’t use more than ten because this will give less weight to each. Also, avoid duplicates.

Video Thumbnail

A good video thumbnail is important because every internet user makes a split-second decision to click on your video or not based on its title and the thumbnail image. Youtube will generate 3 random images to choose from, and if they aren’t perfect, you should upload your own. This option may not be available to every user, so make sure you are in a good standing with Youtube and you have followed Google’s terms of service.

Advanced Settings

The more information you provide to Youtube, the more relationships Youtube and Google will find with other users. This will cause your video to be favored in Youtube and Google searches for certain users, so make sure to add a date and location under the “advanced settings” tab.

Share and Promote

This is beyond the scope of this article, but now that you have a great video that is perfectly optimized, it is time to share, link-to, embed, and promote your video. The more action it gets on as many different websites and social media services as possible, the more relevance Google will acknowledge for your video and the higher it will rank.

When you consistently create new, valuable, and engaging videos, then optimize, share, and promote them on Youtube, you will experience a solid, and usually profitable return from your investment of time, money, and energy.

Good luck, and don’t give up!

Article by Mike Gamache. Mike is the CEO of Fleetfoot Marketing, a video marketing company.