Increasing Your Video Visibility Beyond YouTube

It’s no secret that after Google, YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the U.S. and beyond. Often when it comes to publishing unique video content, a brand will simply upload their video onto YouTube and perhaps also embed the video on its site. While this makes you video content searchable by billions of users, there’s still much more you can do to maximize your video’s social exposure.

 

But first, let’s take a quick look at just how massive online video has become to truly understand the opportunities at stake here. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released a study at the beginning of the year that found that 59 million Americans viewed digital video at lease once a month during 2014, up 13% from 2013.

 

In line with this spike in digital video viewership is a distinct rise in digital video ad spend, with $4.15 billion spent on digital ads in 2014. While this amount only represents 2.4% of total ad spend, that percentage is expected to balloon to 15% by 2017. Add into this data the fact that the millennial generation—who also comprises a large percentage of social media usage—is particularly fond of video and it becomes clear that to truly reach your target viewers, expanding your video reach beyond YouTube is essential.

 

So what are some of the other platforms digital marketers should be investing time and resources in to maximize their social video presence? Starting with the biggest network, Facebook has increasingly embraced video in the past several years and its massive scale and endless opportunities are two great reasons to be posting your video content on Facebook as the right video can easily go viral on the platform in a matter of hours.

 

Another growing and fertile platform for video content is Instagram and its 300 million users. While Instagram only started offering its ad program late last year, it did not result in the major user backlash that some were fearing, making it a fantastic opportunity for both advertisers and video creators. Also, content creators are increasingly finding a welcome audience for video content of all kinds, making it an ideal platform for your company to experiment with its video content.

 

Behind Facebook and Instagram, both Vine, with its 40 million members, and Periscope, with its 10 million members, present exciting opportunities for advertisers and marketers to take advantage of these growing, Twitter-owned services. These two networks prohibit interruptive video spots, requiring advertisers to reach out to influencers and popular video users for product promotions, providing fantastic inbound marketing opportunities.

 

While the above four platforms are certainly some of the largest and fastest-growing, there are plenty of other services to potentially promote your video content on, including Pinterest—which just started permitting video ads—Twitch, and Snapchat. So the next time you are seeking to promote a video, do not make the mistake of limiting your ad spend and content efforts to YouTube, but rather see where your customers are spending their time and purchase ad space or promote a video on the social services that best match your brand.