The concept of video seeding is an important part of viral video production and a method of gaining a certain amount of initial viewership for a video, hoping some of those watching will share the video with friends. Video seeding explained is a multilayered topic that we here at Render Perfect Productions, your video marketing experts in Baltimore, Maryland are happy to explain further.
Video Seeding on Video Sharing Sites
The first logical step is to upload your video to some video sharing services we recommend, starting with YouTube and supporting with other posts on websites such as Vimeo. This step is a requirement, because to properly seed the video, you need to have a link to share. A link to YouTube will do the trick. Take full advantage of the options offered, such as title selection, thumbnail selection (if there is a pretty girl in our video, choose her as the thumbnail!), description, tags, annotations, HD version, subtitles,.
Posting your video to a website such as YouTube can guarantee additional views by itself. The best case would be if you had the option to have your video posted by a power user–a person who has already posted many successful videos and has a lot of subscribers and friends on the file sharing website. If that is not an option, try to at least build up your own account and your channel–interact with other users, subscribe to their channels, post meaningful comments on their videos–they WILL reciprocate.
Repeat on other video sharing websites, here are some to get you started: YouTube, Vimeo, Vevo (for music), DailyMotion, Veoh, MetaCafe, Flickr (Yes, they allow you to post videos too–not only images), Break, Yahoo! Videos, Blip.tv, Viddler, and many, many more!
Video Seeding on social media
Social Media is one of the most useful tools in viral video marketing–posting your video (YouTube direct link) and asking all your family, friends, mailman, staff at your company, and your ferret to share the video, give you a like, and a comment is a great start. Engage in meaningful discussion, join relevant message boards, join the right LinkedIn groups and talk to people, then share your video. The more the better!
Identify Influencers
Influencers are the power users on social media and video website. They are powerful bloggers and journalists, in short: they are the people who can choose to share your video by doing which gives you truckloads of free traffic! In case of our viral video success–the JK Divorce Entrance Dance–the biggest influencer that got us started was the College Humor website. You want to find the right people and make sure they see your video–research them and find their email, connect with them on LinkedIn, send them a friend request on Facebook, or use the theory of Six Degrees of Separation–find a mutual friend and ask them to suggest your video to the Influencer (SEO people call them linkerati by the way)!
Email Marketing
We all have those friends that send us the daily funny email string–ask them to share your video! Do the same yourself–email the video to all your friends! Ask them to do the same, have your company do the same, once again, the more the better!
Advertising
You can always choose the easy way out and pay for advertising, such as sponsored videos on YouTube–this can be done right through Google Adwords as of their latest campaign update–or another high-traffic video website.
Dedicated Web Page
Instead of (or besides) posting your videos on YouTube, you can choose to create a landing page for your video on your corporate website. You can also take it a step further and create a dedicated website just for the video–if you do that, think HARD about selecting a suitable domain name–something funny and easy to remember would be perfect. This approach gives you more tools for marketing your video offline–an alternative to this is a URL shortener for your YouTube link.
About Render Perfect Productions:
Render Perfect has been built from the ground up to service growing businesses and help them realize their full visual storytelling and digital marketing potential. We’ve created a service offering and skill-set that spans video production, post-production, motion graphic design, 3D animation, web development, and video marketing strategy. Our insight and experience allow us to help clients make better planning decisions and get more out of their video production effort.
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