How Video Can Make Your Social Media Marketing More Effective

People can find the fast moving world of social media a little confusing at times, especially when it comes to working out what the relevance is to their business.

The first thing to bear in mind is that ‘social media’ isn’t just Facebook and Twitter. I quite like the Wiktionery definition – ‘media that is created to be shared freely’.

So blogs, both company and personal, ‘Wikis’ (like Wikipedia), sites that encourage customer comments, message boards etc are all social media.

And social media is mass – even if people don’t use Facebook or Twitter or contribute to Wikis, they do read blogs, customer comments and message boards. So your customers are going to be using, consuming, sharing and perhaps even creating social media, both in their working and personal lives.

So your customers are using it, but why should you be using it? Well, for 4 reasons:

• It allows you to develop deeper relationships and build trust with existing and potential customers;
• It allows your content to spread ‘virally’ to other potential customers if you create the right sort of content and make it easy for people to share it;
• It drives relevant traffic to your site as people find your content via search engines;
• It gives a reason for potential clients to revisit your site (and for you to re-contact them to re-visit your site).

But you need ‘content’ that you can distribute and your potential customers want to consume via social media and that will make them look favourably on your company.

……………….In short, you need to see yourself as a magazine publisher.

If you just talk about your product all the time people are soon going to switch off. You need to think about what sort of information that you can give your prospective clients that they’ll find useful and that is relevant to what you do. And you have to be able to produce that content on a regular basis – just like a magazine publisher.

If you’re a retailer, this is easy as your day to day operations will throw up lots of opportunities for creating content – sales, product discounts, new products coming in etc. But for other businesses, this can be trickier. What do you create if you’re promoting a small regional hotel, or you run a chain of dry cleaners?

So if you’re a hotel think about things that will draw people to stay with you and that people will find interesting. It might be interesting things to do in the area, local festivals and events, or features on the local farmers who supply your restaurant. All these things showcase good reasons to come to your hotel without needing to write about the rooms or the hotel facilities, and they give your hotel a more human face which makes it altogether more appealing.

If you’re a dry cleaner, create content about how to shift tricky stains from clothes that can’t be washed, techniques for the ‘perfectly pressed suit/jacket/dress’ or tips for making clothing alterations at home.  Surely that sort of content will decrease your business rather than increase it?  Most people will appreciate the advice but still bring their dry cleaning and alterations to you because they don’t have the time to do it themselves and they can see from your blog that you really know what you’re doing.

And what does video have to do with all this? Well, video can provide great content for social media. And people like to consume video on social media. ‘Vlogging’ (video blogging) is one the rise and Facebook is the no.3 site for video consumption on the internet and growing in this respect fast. And from your perspective, video allows you to make a more personal connection with your customers and, although it’s a cliché, it is true to say that ‘people buy people.’

You’re probably not going to make every piece of social media content a video, so pick the subjects where video is going to have the highest impact – your hotel chef rustling up one of his signature dishes or a video demonstration of how to get that trouser crease razor sharp.

So my advice is to get started on social media if you haven’t already – even if it’s just with a corporate blog to begin with. Get yourself thinking in publisher mode and then work out how and when to best to employ video to enhance your content. It will take a little time to get things right – keep an eye on your traffic stats to see what’s working and what’s not – but if you stick at it, you won’t regret it.