We know how much time, energy and money you spend in making a video with us. We want to make sure you get great ROI on your investment and critical to this is Video Seeding. Video seeding is a set of simple steps that will boost your videos SEO, increase social engagement and allows your video to have far greater impact. And best of all it’s a simple and painless process!

 

Our growing instructions to Video Seeding

Step 1 – Surveying the ground

Keywords

We recommend selecting a focus keyword for a video and pairing it with a relevant content page on your website. So you need to think about the phrases that people would Google for in order to find your content.

If you’re unsure which keywords to target, try the Google ads keyword tool. You can run different variants of keywords to see which are the most popular on Google. You’ll see which combination of words gets the most searches, and target that one.

Hashtags

Researching keywords is essential for Twitter and Instagram, and increasingly for Facebook. If you’re distributing directly on social media or using these channels to lead people to your content, then you can research the hashtags your target audience and competitors uses when they post.

Statistics

Note the followers on your social spaces. See what average activity you have. Note down your stats – numbers of followers etc. It’s useful to have this as a measure against your post campaign activity.

Influencers

Next, work out who your Influencers are that will help grow your video’s distribution. Which bloggers or journalists are interested in your product? It might help to send them a link in advance, so they can feel they have an ‘exclusive’ and be responding to your video on the launch date.

Step 2 – Preparing the Soil

Profiles

Get your Social Media profiles up to date, particularly the profile and background images. The platforms are constantly evolving their layout and features, so make sure any images still work in the current format.

video-seedingIf you’re promoting a particular product, change your URL from your home page to that product’s landing page. For example, Instagram allows you a link in your profile, make sure it’s for the content page you’re promoting rather than your home website.

Followers

Have you checked who’s following you? Is it appropriate to follow them back? We mentioned bloggers and journalists above – do they have profiles you can follow?

Teasers

At this stage, start posting content to build interest and awareness of your video or product launch. These might be stills from the shoot, or images of the storyboard. This is to grow you audience for when the launch happens.

All of this activity prepares the ground for seeding.

Step 3 – Gathering the Seeds

There are a range of seeds you’ll need for your campaign, depending where you’re posting and who you’re trying to reach. Here are a few:

  • format- specific video files

  • video stills

  • shorter campaign edits

  • gifs

  • high res images from filming shoots

  • thumbnail images

We can provide all of these assets and deliver our files to you with the project name. However, we recommend that you can also add your keywords to the files names before you upload them.

Step 4 – Planting

Where you plant the video will depend on your audience and the content. Note: you should always upload natively to each platform, rather than, for example, posting a clip from YouTube on Facebook. Linkedin is the only platform that doesn’t let you upload video directly.

YouTube

We recommend posting your video directly to YouTube as it is the king of video websites. As Google owns it, it’s also a heavy influence on page rankings in search.

Your Website

Place your video in pride of place on your landing page, its much more engaging than a long paragraph of text explaining what you do and can increase conversions by 86% (source Eyeview Digital)

You can embed the video directly from YouTube, but you should also consider using a specialist video hosting site like Wisita, as they give you more analytics and functionality.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

Post it to Facebook and Instagram, preferably in a version with built in subtitles. Make sure you’re using the hashtags in your description.

Linkedin

LinkedIn doesn’t have a facility for you to upload directly, There are three ways you can share video content on LinkedIn, learn about them here.

Tips for Video Seeding on YouTube

Title

Make sure your title is clear, click-worthy and under 70 characters. Oh, and contains your keywords!

Description

When writing your description, imagine you’re googling for your product. What question would you ask Google? What answer would compel you to click? And what phrases sound like the perfect answer? Make sure your description reflects this.

Keep your description under 165 characters so that the whole of the description will appear in search results.

Link

Add a link to your product page in the top line of your description or it won’t be visible without viewers clicking “show more”. If you product page is deep inside your site map ie:

www.napoleoncreative.com/case-studies/automotive/animation

then get a shorter re-direct url or a bit.ly url set up, so it uses fewer characters.

Closed Captions

Add closed captions to your video manually, don’t rely on their auto-caption feature to get it right. Studies have shown that YouTube indexes closed captions and factors them into search rank. Subtitles make your video accessible to deaf or hard of hearing viewers, as well as those for whom English is a second language. Google rewards this kind of content with closed caption with a higher ranking.

Cards

Encourage your viewers to interact with your videos by adding cards, which can point them to a specific URL (from a list of eligible sites) and show customised images, titles and calls to action, depending on the card type.

End Screens

You can build viewership with powerful end screens on your videos, which show on mobile and desktop devices. Use end screens at the end of a video to:

  • Point viewers to other videos, playlists or channels on YouTube

  • Call for subscriptions to your channel

  • Promote your website or crowdfunding campaigns

For more information, read YouTube’s end screens help post.

Step 5 – Nurturing

Seedrs Video Thumbnail

Now that your campaign is planted, it’s time to help it grow.

  • Create an Email campaign – lead with a still image with a clear video play logo (see above) to entice readers to click, we can provide this for you
  • Share your video on LinkedIn – add it to the contacts section of your profile or embed it in the body of your profile.
  • Share on your social media profiles – remember to upload natively
  • Share with bloggers and journalists – we can introduce you to several PR partners who specialise in different areas that can help
  • Pay per click – We can introduce you to a partner who can help you set up this for your project the right paid for marketing
  • Ad campaigns- Targeted via social media, bloggers and other published media related to your industry
  • Keep conversations going around your video by replying to interactions, whether they’re comments, likes, or follows

Step 6 Harvesting

Review the activity, both qualitative and quantitative.

How many views? How many likes? How many new followers? What did people respond to?

Have you interacted with people who left comments?

Have you had a lift in sales? Have any new leads contacted you?

 

Why is Video Seeding important?

All these actions increase the chance of your content getting found, watched, and engaged with. So video seeding is critical to getting new customers.

At Napoleon Creative there are no Account Handlers or PA firewalls.

When you contact us you'll get straight through to our Creative Director, Gavin Ricketts.