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How Can Video Be Best Used
for Social Media Marketing?
By Pete Krainik
CEO of The CMO Club
Before starting The CMO Club, I was as a CMO myself, and I cared about four things: 1) building brand awareness, 2) engaging customers around our brands, 3) getting customers to purchase our products or services, and 4) providing brand-differentiating customer service and experience.
Given social media is an important vehicle in all four of these areas, it's not about where video works or doesn't work, it's about how to leverage video effectively in each of these areas:
- Building awareness: Videos help you tell stories about your brand.
- Engaging customers: Customer-driven content, customer-curated content, and video stories about customer engagement can be very effective.
- Driving purchases: Customer references or call-to-action videos are key here.
- Providing great customer service: Video manuals and customer-driven how-to-use videos on new products should be part of your arsenal.
Finally, videos used for social media marketing must be “social media worthy"—easy to access, share, and understand. Remember, your videos are an extension of your brand.
How Can Video Be Best Used
for Social Media Marketing?
By Hollis Thomases
Author of Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day
Video not only brings pictures to life, it accomplishes so many things that marketers strive to do: instruct, educate, demonstrate, update, replicate, initiate, stimulate, entertain—and more! Today, with hundreds of thousands of people equipped with video cameras in their pockets and on their smartphones, practically anyone can generate video content. And though the quality of this "pocket video" might not be of professional caliber, our society has also accepted that there are some instances where real-time "record and post" videos trump professional ones.
That being said, there are instances when social media marketing demands broadcast-quality video. Here are a few examples:
- Not sure how to use those fancy Black & Decker tools your spouse just brought home? Log into Facebook to view how.
- Considering the University of Phoenix for your next step in education? Learn almost everything you'd want to know by visiting its YouTube channel to watch hundreds of student testimonials, course reviews, mini-documentaries, and webisodes.
- By combining livestreaming via UStream with the reach of the @Zappos corporate Twitter account, Zappos.com allows anyone to watch its meetings, company events, and more. Talk about transparency!
- On its LinkedIn company page, Microsoft makes good use of video for its recent "To the Cloud" slogan by pulling in a YouTube-hosted commercial.
- Jeffrey Hayzlett, book author and former Kodak CMO, reinforces his message with video blog posts.
Like the medium of video itself, the limitations on how to use it in and with social media are only hindered by the marketer's creative imagination.
How Can Video Be Best Used
for Social Media Marketing?
By Patrick Strother
Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota
The best way to use video for social media marketing is ultimately determined by your objectives.
For example, while standalone viral videos create exposure, they often lead to no real substantive action. So if your goal is awareness rather than trial, you may have partially achieved it, depending on how well it actually reached your intended audience. But if your goal is specific action, the video may have only achieved a small first step in the consumer adoption process. Another way to think of this: your video was efficient, but not effective.
What you as a marketer should be most concerned with in producing video content is that it is designed to resonate with your key audiences and drive specific desired behaviors. A clear and compelling call to action is more important in developing your video than achieving millions of views with no real objective result. Another important criteria is that the best videos generally create a user experience that can't be duplicated by words alone. Video is the closest thing we have in social media marketing to face-to-face contact.
Simple ways to integrate video into your overall marketing plan include incorporating content that is most relevant to your audience. This is often informative, "how-to" tips or testimonials showing a specific attribute of the product, such as ease of use.
When tied to specific objectives, social media and video make a powerful combination. Video and other social media tactics must work together to address a wide range of marketing goals, including awareness, interest, improved search engine rankings, relationship building, branding, engagement, trial, and loyalty.
Pete Kranik is the founder and Chairman of The CMO Club. He has more than 25 years of experience in marketing, product management, sales, and IT in the high-tech, software, and consumer goods industries. Prior to forming The CMO Club, Pete served as Avaya's Global Vice President of Marketing, the Chief Marketing Officer for DoubleClick, and the GM of the Consumer Goods Division of Siebel Systems. Prior to Siebel, he spent 15 years at Mars, Inc.
Hollis Thomases is the author of the new book, Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day. She is an accomplished public speaker and a contributing columnist for ClickZ. Hollis was named the 2007 SBA Maryland Small Business Person of the Year, 2008 Enterprising Woman of the Year by Enterprising Women magazine, and recently made the Baltimore Business Journal's List of Baltimore's Top 50 Women-Owned Businesses.
Patrick Strother is a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota. He is also the Principal at Strother Communications Group (SCG). Patrick is a thought leader in the integration of research, branding, public relations, advertising, social media, and direct marketing. He created the proprietary "Converging on Customers" model to help guide SCG in the long term.
