Over the past few years, video has become a pretty integral part of my businesses. I use video almost daily to create new content to gain new clients, keep in touch with past and future clients, and basically run most elements of the companies. When I travel the country as a Social Media Speaker, the top subject I am asked to present on for the past 6+ years has been on video. I am a part of a few dozen groups on Facebook all related to video and one of the questions that gets discussed is where should I place my videos? Should I put my videos on Facebook or YouTube? Should they be on Instagram? What about Vimeo? Which is the best place for videos to get the best traffic.
While I’ve had some videos go somewhat viral and get over 1 million views on YouTube, I don’t consider myself a YouTube creator trying to do this for a career yet, so for those purposes, we are going to ignore Adsense and it’s role in videos today. On some of my channels I run videos for ad revenue, but it normally takes me a few months till I see any income from it. My other channel, I do not run ads on at all as it is for my real estate business in Myrtle Beach. If I were to run ads there, my competitors could place ads before my videos and steal my traffic without them ever seeing my video.
So, to answer the question, where should I post my videos, let me give you my opinion on this topic. I believe that you should post your videos onto everywhere you can. I’ve built up followings on several different platforms over the past several years. Each platform though works very differently. My YouTube followers is a different group of subscribers from those who I’m connected to on Facebook. Those who like my Facebook page are very different from those who follow me on Twitter. Each platform runs & acts differently, and each platform wants the content loaded natively into it’s own platform to give it the most amount of weight.
What About Auto-Sharing?
Just today in one of the video groups I am a part of, a gentleman shared the following post:
He was so proud that he had found a way to share his videos to more than one platform at a time and save some time & effort. But, what he doesn’t realize is that when you do cross posting of content like this, you are hurting your rankings dramatically on the platforms. Each platform is going to give you the highest ranking on your content if it is published organically in that platform versus something it can tell was published to various places at once.
Facebook in particular wants your content to live on the platform and doesn’t want you even sharing links anymore in your posts that can drive people away from the social network giant. I used to place links to my blog posts on my Facebook posts all the time, until I realized it was hurting my Edgerank by adding links to outside sources on my business page. Instead, what I do now is post links to my websites and other articles in first comment of the post instead. That way I’m not getting penalized for sending my Facebook fans out of the network when publishing a new update.
My Process For Posting
So when I’ve got a new video to upload, I start by uploading the video first onto YouTube. I upload it as an unlisted video most times first and then after it has completely uploaded, I then customize my thumbnail, create the captions for the video. I then download the .SRT file to use on Facebook and head over to my website. I will then write the entire blog post, embed the YouTube video, get everything into a written format. Once this is done, I then head over to Facebook.
On my business page, I then upload the video again natively. I then make sure to fill out the info on the video description, title, & tags on Facebook and hit upload again with the .en_US.SRT file inserted to add captions here as well. Thanks to high speed internet, it takes only a few moments, and the video is now loaded in both places. I then go to the first comment on Facebook and add the link back to my website where the full post is written that relates to the video I just uploaded.
My final step is then to go back to YouTube, edit the video and add a link back to my website in the video description and make the video go public there as well. Sometimes after a few days I will go back to my original video and create a condensed version that will get loaded onto Instagram to share it out again and give it a little more exposure, but if time is limited, this step will get left out. The final steps then include sharing images to Pinterest, tweeting out the post on my site to Twitter, and also sharing the link on Google+.
It’s a rather simple and basic process I use, but this system helps me get the most exposure for my content across all programs, and all of it is done individually. To do all of this, it may take me 30 minutes, of which 25 of it is normally spent writing the blog content. The other things are normally done within the last 5 minutes and is quick and easy. But, by doing this individually and taking the extra time, I get the most exposure for my content and get my content seen by more eyes than if it was simply uploaded to one place and then shared everywhere else.
So in the future, take the little bit of extra time and do the extra steps. You will see a much greater level of exposure on your content.