Growing Your Video Audience

Video Is Everywhere!

It’s great to see video becoming the dominant style of content on social networks. However each platform does video a little differently and the audience online has become pretty fragmented.

Now every business is throwing out tags for Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and more. It’s a bit overwhelming to keep up with them all, especially because they all have their own bells and whistles.

If you are serious about growing your audience then it’s still absolutely possible to be successful, but things like consistency and branding are must-haves if you are going to throw your hat in the ring with content of your own.
To start you want to have all your channels set up properly with an obvious username for your business that’s the same across platforms. Use your business’s name if possible. Then you have to take small bets on each platform to see where it’s really going to be worthwhile to invest your time and energy.

Not every platform is going to work for every business so it’s important to have some type of metric to judge your performance.

You can look at the time spent watching your videos, the number of views, as well as the percentage of conversions back to your website.

Don’t try to be a hero and put content on every platform equally, you will hit a wall and burn out! Once you find the platforms where your videos are working the best then you can focus on how to grow that audience further.

A real simple technique to getting your online audience started is to see who is sharing your competitors videos on other social platforms and to send them a short message saying “Hi,” and telling them to check out your content.

This is a low key and friendly way to engage with new communities and can help you get the ball rolling. If you do 10 to 20 of these a day then you’ll definitely get some responses back and you’ll probably grab some new followers too.

Doing this on the 1-to-1 level is a lot more personal and doesn’t come off as spammy if you take the time to write a unique message for each contact.

Another strategy we use in my business is to follow the Facebook pages of other people in our niche and to see what posts are already working for their audiences and then producing our own similar content. In the Admin of your page you can follow other pages as well and you can get a read of what’s going on in your space.

If we saw a certain video was being shared a lot, we’d take the core idea but put our own twist on it. This helped mitigate the risk of putting out content because we already verified it would be interesting to our audience.
Everybody starts at zero but if you can take incremental steps everyday and monitor your growth with data then it’s going to make a big difference.

 

Action Steps

1. Step up your social channels with a clear brand for your business.
2. Try out video content on every channel then narrow down to the most effective ones.
3. Build a list of who shares your competitors content on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
4. Reach out to 10-20 accounts per day with a personalized message to check out your content.
5. Monitor competitor’s Facebook pages and see what content is doing well for them.
6. Create similar content that puts your own spin on the subject.

 

Result You Will Achieve

A method to your grow your video audience across platforms that adds up over time.
 

 
This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.