Twitter is a uniquely challenging environment on which to do video marketing. The limited amount of information permitted by the Twitter format drives the need to pack a lot of information into a short but coherent message meant to engage a target audience. As such, the appeal of the video must be immediate, forceful, and relevant. Otherwise, it will simply be lost in the mix with the potential customer simply moving on to the next tweet never learning who the sponsor of the video was and certainly not watched again.
Whatever expectation the sponsor had from the customer who watched the video, that expectation will not be met. For those reasons, some very sound strategic thinking and creative energy must go into doing video marketing on Twitter. Your six seconds of glory can either go viral or just be six seconds that will live in infamy, your Pearl Harbor of doom.
New Twitter is a Must
The first thing you must know from the video marketing perspective is that the ways of the old Twitter must be abandoned for the ways of the new Twitter. It used to be that your Twitter video was linked to your Twitter page but hosted on a third party app server such as TwitVid. The new Twitter now has the ability to watch your video in stream off the same browser screen on which your Twitter page is showing.
A new API has been developed and agreements signed with many of the third party app providers that used to host access to Twitter to now show tweet videos directly in stream. YouTube, Vimeo, TwitVid, Flickr, Justin.TV, DeviantART along with others have been signed up. A new mobile app, Vines, has also been launched that will give the customer direct access to post up a maximum 6 second video directly from your smart phone to Twitter. The iPhone app is free and ready to go. You can download it today. The point is that video on Twitter has become more user friendly and accessible which makes it more likely those potential customers will watch your video on the new Twitter.
Video Advertising Strategy for Twitter
The unique environment of Twitter is the strength of its advertising value. The environment is dynamic and immediate. What you tweet is seen or heard the minute you quit typing or uploading. Tweeters visit the Twitter homepage two or three times per day to check for trending issues and tweets. Your video marketing strategy must take advantage of the reason why people come to visit the website in the first place. They want relevant fresh information and they want it now. They do not want senseless chatter and information with no value to them. Your video marketing strategy has to provide what the tweeter expects. There are seven basic steps to consider and to be honest; they are primarily common sense and part of a process that has been in existence since time began. Twitter is one of those disruptive innovation processes that challenge the establishment and forces change. The message inherent in Twitter is accept change and reap the benefits.
1. Relevance and Value:
Think through what the whole message is you are trying to communicate and how can it be broken up into tweet-sized pieces.
2. Immediacy and Visibility:
The order of the messages is critically important. A general trend of first sending out an overview tweet capturing the essence of the advertising campaign should be first followed up with more specific and limited messages in support of the primary one. Promoted trends and tweets get more clicks but they cost money. This is a decision point in how to pursue the marketing campaign. A promoted trend or tweet gets the best seat in the Twitter house on page one.
3. Real Time Value:
Your marketing campaign has to have fresh and current information. People visit Twitter for what is happening TODAY. If you post old news about your products in real time, you will not get the results you expect. If you are marketing older products or services that have not changed considerably, other avenues of marketing are available such as banner ads on Facebook or other more static environments.
4. Associate and Connect:
This is the primary challenge in trying to keep the message together over a series of video tweets. Hash tags are the answer and you must be clever with them so you can keep them open-ended to a degree. They will categorize your video ads and reaching the target audience you want. Remember that the hash tag is what Twitter search keys on. Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other Tweets marked with that keyword. Hash tagged words that become very popular are often Trending Topics and end up on the Twitter homepage.
5. Integrated Communication:
Do not ignore the value of a text tweet as an accompaniment to the video tweet. You have 140 characters to expand and create the vision the video is trying to put into the mind of the customer. The hash tags are absolutely critical here to keep the message together across the various pieces. One text tweet per video tweet is reasonable.
6. Avoid Saturation:
You can overwhelm your customer with too much information in a day’s time. One to three videos per day with text extenders is enough. Save some for tomorrow and the next day and the next. A good hash tag strategy over a couple of day’s time will keep your act together.
7. Improve Your Process Continually:
SEO and Twitter are dynamic venues. You must change with it. Disruptive change such as using Twitter for video marketing begins as a sub-optimal process and is refined over time to be better than what preceded it. It is always a best business practice to develop processes in a continual process improvement environment. Do a lessons learned wash up after each video marketing campaign and roll the refinements back into the process.
