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How to Share a Vlog on Social Media

Sharing your vlog. First I want to share this quote from Seth Godin because I think he's brilliant and this really sums it up. "'Build it and they will come' only works in movies. "Social media is a build it, nurture it, "engage them, and they may stay." And that is extremely important. The feedback I get the most is, I don't have an audience, I don't have a community, I don't have anything anywhere, but I disagree. If you've ever met anybody at any point in time in your life, there is a community that will help you grow and so you have to remember where it is right now that you have attention. It doesn't matter how or where, but where is it? It could be an email list, it could be a community group, it could be a Twitter presence, it could be something else, but where do you have any attention? Just one, two, three? Hopefully 50, maybe 100, maybe more. You have attention somewhere. Leverage that, start there. Everyone's gotta start somewhere. Not everyone is just gifted a big audience ...

for them to make videos to. There's a lot of work in this, and like I said, you've got to get them to watch it, so that's gonna be part of this process that's gonna be nurturing that community to stay tuned. So let's start with publishing on YouTube. So a couple of practices here. Send attention to the YouTube watch page link for the first 24 to 48 hours. If YouTube is going to be that kind of home base of video in terms of where it is in the social sphere, that's gonna be the main jam. I'm uploading there and I want to grow my subscribers, I'm gonna grow that presence. Ya gotta be invested in it. You're gonna be tempted to finish the video, upload it to YouTube, be disappointed with the views, and then want to upload it elsewhere, right? Because you spent all that time and all that effort. Oh, I'll just upload it to Facebook then. Oh, maybe we can upload it to Twitter. But if you really invested in growing one presence, you have to stop making it easy to get you everywhere. Make them take the step. The reason, specifically on YouTube this is important is because you'll notice once you get behind YouTube and look at analytics a little bit more carefully, the data about a video doesn't really shake out firmly in analytics firmly in analytics for 24 to 48 hours. So if I upload a video today on YouTube, I'm really not gonna know what the retention rate was or shares, or views, really specifically for two days. Realtime analytics does give you some insight, which is nice because that's been a godsend just to be able to know how it's doing, but because of that, you really have to send the attention to that watch page. YouTube makes money on youtube.com, not on your blog, not on Twitter, sometimes in these places because of ads, but they make the most money on youtube.com. So if you help them with that, you've got to get the attention there. So that's why I say sharing the link to where the video exists specifically, a YouTube watch page with the comments and your subscribe button and everything, that's where you need to send people. Was that your question? Yeah. Great, great. Does that make sense? Did I clarify that? Okay, good. Be the first to comment. If you don't like other peoples' comments, put your own in there, right? This is a clear indication that you've started a conversation and you're gonna stay for the rest of it. Show up, ask a question that might be followup to what you just presented. Get them to hit the like button or say something in response. Let them know that you are hanging out there. I try, whenever I can in my schedule to plan to publish a video and be present in the comments for about a half an hour after, so that especially those people that get in there early that are helping me with this piece are getting that special attention and the more they're commenting with you, the more comments. We all know what engagement does for social. It moves it up, it moves it up, it shows YouTube there's activity here, people like it, literally and in the comments. They're talking. These are not trolls, these are thoughtful comments. There's a few people in here that have left me lots of thoughtful comments that I cannot thank you enough for because that's what's helping me grow as a channel. That's helping the video take off, but in turn, that's helping me as a channel in terms of the health that YouTube is gonna say in the future, "Oh, next time "she uploads, let's make sure we show that to "a few more people." Yeah, the people that subscribed to that should be seeing it anyway, but you know how that works with algorithms, you've got to work really hard for it. Does that make sense? Reply to everyone's comments because you can in the beginning, and I definitely did. I know it sounds crazy. You might not be able to do it right away, but if you want more people to watch, you should let the people who are watching know that you care about them first. Reply to every comment. Evan Carmichael has like, 500,000 subscribers on YouTube and he and his team, now he has to have help now, but they reply to every comment. That's a lot of comments, but they really care about that community and so should we. So every first person, even if it's mom. My mom is commenting on my videos now and I'm like, "This is so cool!" Because I'm talking to people I don't know, and I'm like, "I kind of know them, and then like, oh, there's mom, "okay, cool." At first it's like, "Oh, it's just mom," but everyone matters, every single person. Add the video to YouTube playlist. Is anyone familiar with the playlist feature on YouTube? So this is extremely important and very much underutilized. Playlists are essentially sort of a way of laying out the channel, which I love. So you can see there's an uploads playlist here, popular uploads here. We've got keynote speaker. That's all my speaking video, and then et cetera, et cetera. Then you have sort of the entire database of playlists that you can create. Playlists are like their own little video upload. They get categorized differently than the video in terms of an SEO result and shows YouTube that you're actually using the features they like, and what happens when somebody hits play on a playlist? Any playlist, Spotify, anything? Everything in that playlist plays. That's why YouTube likes it because you've just helped them by sharing your video in a playlist, you've helped them start that average session of 40 minutes on mobile that people are watching YouTube. You're not sending them away after that video is over or worse, right after it started, right? Because we took care of that already. Playlists are extremely important and underutilized. So these titles, you can add metadata to these playlists, so help yourself get more views by actually adding videos to playlists. If this is intimidating because you like, "I have four "videos, Amy, honestly." Add everyone else's videos (laughs) that are relevant to what you talked about in a playlist. If I have an email marketing playlist and I've only got one video about email marketing, I'm gonna add some other great email marketing videos to that playlist because now it's a resource for somebody. I started it, YouTube likes that, we started a session with it, I get credit as a channel for that. Does that make sense? Features are there for a reason. We always think these social networks are trying to give us a hard time. They're doing it because they know the users. They're doing it because they know what gets people excited, so keep that in mind. Twitter, sharing on Twitter. I highly recommend that you don't just use it as your distribution platform for your latest video. You should really be a tweeter, not just a promoter. I've struggled with this because in the business base, we're always looking for tools to streamline things and keep it easy, and fast, and scale, and do it automatically, but Twitter is like that one social network that was always a realtime conversation. It still very much is and it's so useful for that reason, so the more you do that and pepper in the new content that you're releasing, the more it's going to convert for you. Build excitement with your coming videos. Don't just say, "It's here, go watch it!" I like to tease things. Hey, I'm uploading. What do you think about this topic? Oh, get ready, the video is coming. And I can show you examples of that. Do as much as you can or it's 140 characters of fun. Like, it's the easiest social network to use. I don't know why people are squashing Twitter so much these days. Use your custom thumbnail to leverage space on the timeline, so I'll show you that. This is an example of what I do before a video is coming out. Typically I have a GIF here, but we couldn't do that for a lot of reasons here. But you can go see that on my timeline. This was a time when I could not upload a GIF, so I just so happened to find it. I don't have a signal (laughs), but I wanted you to know that video incoming. This is sort of ritual that I have now. Once the video is processed and ready to go, I'll be like, "Guys, the video's coming." And then whoever's watching or looking at Twitter and saying, "Oh, this is great. "I'm just gonna hang here for a second "and wait for that tweet to come." And then guess what comes right after that? My tweet. The custom thumbnail helps me take up more real estate on the timeline about my hashtag, which is nice for just that kind of syndication and I'm taking them straight to where? The watch page, youtube.com/yadayadayadayada. And leveraging the asset here, you could even do something a little differently. I like to use photo, I like to use the thumbnail on Twitter, but you could upload a native video, or you could make GIF out of the content you just made. Maybe some funny thing happened, like me and Kurt laughing at the fact that he was looking at his phone or something. We can turn that into a GIF and put that here and really gave people a taste. On Twitter, it's very fast moving and you're competing with a timeline to pull people in, but leverage media here. On Instagram, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but some of the best practices here, use an image from your shoot for the Instagram post. It doesn't necessarily have to be the thumbnail. I don't prefer to post a thumbnail image as a post on Instagram because it's more promotional than it is sharing a moment. I think Instagram right now is in a beautiful space of documenting and showing sort of not just behind the scenes, but this was a special moment and I'm gonna write a long sort of micro blog caption to bring you into that, and I think you can use that opportunity to say here's a moment where I'm laughing onset or here's a behind-the-scenes thing that aesthetically looks really nice, and then you share a caption of the importance of the content, the importance of the video, why you decided to do it, and then say P.S., link in my bio. Go watch it, right? Instead of just uploading the easy thing you have, I'm gonna make you do something else. Find another image that's going to make sense. And so that's what I wanted to point out here. It doesn't always have to be that thumbnail. Could be the thumbnail, but maybe its the thumbnail without the copy on it, right? Aesthetically, context, why does it work on Instagram? How do you make it look like the magazine highlight reel that is Instagram for everybody right now? You've got to fit into that. That's the party I was talking about in that opening video. You show up to the party and then you stand out. So you don't want to post your video on Instagram? Never. Okay. For a few reasons. First of all, I have a personal feeling about the fact that we started to see Instagram decline after they released the upload a video option. In my opinion, that's because people don't really watch video on Instagram. That's changing now because they ripped off stories from Snapchat, which is great, but that's different. That's a different context. When people are on Instagram, they're doing this. Scroll, double tap, scroll, double tap, scroll, oh my God, I love them, I'm gonna leave a comment. Scroll, double tap. Double tap is liking. That's it. Nobody has time to watch a video. They're just trying to get the vibe. What did everybody do? How amazing was it? Now I'm motivated to go have a great day. It's not the same. That's my personal opinion. I can see where people might change that perspective, but I'm definitely not gonna upload my talking head video on Instagram where they wanna scroll so bad because they know somebody's amazing photo is gonna show up right after it. There's too much going on. I will definitely use stories. So like I said before, tell a story in that caption. I love getting creative with Instagram stories. Like, showing off behind the scenes here and this is really teasing a video I'm gonna post on my YouTube channel about presenting a creative life. So use that opportunity to really give someone a behind-the-scenes take. I just love that Instagram took this from Snapchat. I'm so sorry, Snapchat. I'm really pulling for you, but when a social network gives you an entirely different feature to publish on and you're like, "I don't get any likes on my posts," well, have you used stories lately? Use what they're giving you because the two are gonna help each other. If somebody, as a user, follows you and watches all your stories, how likely is it that your post is gonna show up highly in the algorithm? You have to think about how these platforms are thinking. They just want to make people happy when they get there. If you're getting likes from somebody, that means you make them happy, that means your more likely to be seen. That's gonna be the case on a lot of these. Are you all familiar with the fact that you're logging into your social networks and seeing a lot of the same stuff all the time because you have a tendency to like a lot of the same things? There's a reason for that. So here's a example of an Instagram post. This is very similar to my thumbnail photo, but it's different and it's aesthetically perfect for Instagram, it's just sort of like, hey look, I'm just naturally drinking a cup of coffee in a gorgeous environment. (audience laughs) What are you doing? And I talk about it like, "Oh, I'm in Florida! "We're doing this really cool thing and there's all "this stuff going on," yada, yada, yada, and so then I say, "By the way, link in bio. "Go watch the video." On Instagram stories, I've been doing something where I'm leveraging, if you're familiar. This is the text that they allow you to use in Instagram stories. I'm uploading stories and then leveraging that text, so you're gonna watch it play. It's gonna feel like it's not playing because they're images, but you can see here. This photo appears and says ready? Three, two, that's a second image. One. They all look the same, but I added text. And then it says, "Go watch the video, link my bio." So there's still these little ways to add like, little commercials for your content and Instagram stories and then the next story after that was probably me being like, "Look, I'm walking the dog!" And then we're back into real life. So it's still very much behind the scenes, but gives you a glance at making this an intro to the video. Link in bio is very important because was that Kurt? Did you ask me earlier about the swipe up? That's right now only being offered to 10,000 followers and up, but that could change tomorrow. Snapchat rolled it out to every single user because I think they're trying to keep up. So I also like to use Adobe Spark, so I'm gonna show you a montage here that's a combination of animated graphics and the swipe up feature at work. So it looks like it's gonna be an image and then it's animated because Adobe Spark Post is a phenomenal app that helps you do that. This is the second piece, and then I leverage the thumbnail here, white space, and then the normal Instagram text. I love this Instagram text. I try to stick with the same color so it feels like they know they're watching my story every time. That's really fun. And then I have a swipe up feature, so having that culled action and text is nice too. Before I move on from Instagram, were there any questions about that? How do you feel about putting? Or you can do, I think, 15 seconds on stories and a minute, 10 one minute clips actually in your feed. That's right, mm-hmm. How do you feel about putting clips of your video in those other platforms? In the actual post? Yeah, like doing a 15 second clip of a four minute video in your stories? I think it's definitely something that's possible. I think it depends on the context. If I'm sitting here talking to Kurt on camera and it's just two people talking, I don't think that's compelling enough for Instagram, just in my personal opinion. But if it's a time lapse of some lettering happening and you get to go watch that full version in the actual YouTube video, that's a great example of that. But this is more where I start to recommend like, the boomerang feature and things like that. Time lapse and boomerang are awesome video on Instagram, but that's not the same thing as taking that final product and uploading it. So let me put it this way. If it is not audio reliant, 15 seconds of it would actually probably be a great idea. If it was a visually compelling, non-audio required clip, totally Instagram worthy. And then of course, that sort of like, standing image that holds its place is important too for that sort of like, teaser moment, but. What do you mean by audio reliant? If we're talking, the two of us about being a cool dad, but you're scrolling on Instagram, nothing plays for you because its just scroll factor, right? We're talking, we're saying some great stuff, but you can't hear us. So really, two people talking to each other isn't gonna be that interesting if the audio is not on. That's why we were talking about sort of YouTube. You press play, you get both. Everywhere else (laughs) it's kind of a variable. Snapchat, you are getting audio because you really going into an experience. Instagram is kind of a little back and forth based on your preferences, from what I've noticed. It might be the same on Snapchat because I'm less experienced there, but yeah. It's a non-audio reliant moment because you can't guarantee they turn on the audio to see if you video is worth watching 15 seconds of it. But a time lapse of lettering or something visually compelling that's not reliant on audio is more likely to fare well in an Instagram feed. Does that make sense? Yeah. I'm really glad you asked that because I didn't clarify that. Thank you. As I said, I have been on Snapchat for quite some time and lately I just don't pay any attention to it because Instagram just yoinked that awesome stories feature which I love because I think you should be able to share some things on social media and not have it be the end of the world if it disappears. But now we have that with Instagram. So, but I do recommend a lot of things with Snapchat. What I think they do really well is there is more of a conversation happening there in stories. People on Instagram still, when they're watching stories, they want to see things that are pretty. That's pretty consistent across the board. Snapchat, I feel like you can have more of a raw conversation. So talk to them about your vlog topic there and have them chime in with you. Maybe they'll snap you back or send you some ideas. I love that realtime conversation about Snapchat. Share behind the scenes, scrappy and raw. That's what I like a lot about Snapchat. You can't really upload anything there without it being completely found out, so far. That's probably gonna change, I would guess. And then leveraging up that, leveraging that swipe up feature, which is available to everybody as this point. That's always nice for calling action because we really have not had that with Snapchat at all. Any Snapchat users in the house, lovers? Okay, yeah. So it's definitely a great place to keep up with friends. That's the context. You're hanging out with somebody and their friends. So how do you make that work? It's not gonna be a great time to have a commercial for your content. Email is my favorite. I love email. It is the social network that I own. I own that property. I have the email addresses of the people that care about the content the most and they want me to keep in touch with them directly, so asking them, the people who have already given you their contact, their email to offer you some social proof is a great idea. So I love sharing video on email, especially if you're at that 24 hour mark of your video and you're like mm, I could use a few more views on this. Let's get it in before the 48 hour mark, when things start to work themselves out in YouTube analytics. So your email list is the perfect audience for vlog announcements because that's literally what they signed up for, content. Maybe some promotions and products as well, but definitely content. Activate social activity by asking them to comment the secret word or to answer a question. This is sort of my hack to see how many people came over from an email to do something I told them to do. That's a real measure of influence. If I say, "Oh, this video is about great morning habits "for productivity, I want you to type the, "if you watch this video on the YouTube channel, "go over there in the comments and say, 'Hey, I came over "'from the email or here is the secret word, bumble bee,'" or something along those lines. Then I know I moved them over and that, first of all, spurs engagement, second of all, you get more views because then you've given them something to do and now they're watching your video and it's a grand old time. I love little hacks like that because then you can see really, truly if people will move when you ask them to and that's influence, not what some random algorithm is measuring. So here's just an example of my emails. I try to keep them as simple as possible. A lot of people like to get long winded or too clip art-y in their emails. Here's the thumbnail. Hey, here's my personal note about it because you are getting an email for me. So we're best friends, so we're gonna talk about this, go watch the video, simple. Don't make it more work than it needs to be. All right, so let's talk about the big one, Facebook. So sharing on Facebook. I don't upload my videos on Facebook unless they are a little bit older, definitely outside a couple of days, and they have to be a good fit visually for that atmosphere, same thing as Instagram. Scroll, like, scroll, like, scroll, like. How am I going to get them to stop, enter into that video, and watch it? Sharing on Facebook is really important, but the link elsewhere, as it pertains to your situation like a YouTube watch link, is not ideal. Facebook and YouTube secretly like each other. It's sort of like politicians, how they like, play golf together, but they don't want you to know they like each other, but they really don't like each other on the front end. So Facebook takes YouTube links and penalizes them because they don't want you to leave the platform, just like YouTube doesn't want you to leave their platform for Facebook or anybody. So if you go to Facebook and say, "Hey, I'm gonna write "this up, I'm gonna give you a little bit of a status "update here and it's gonna be a YouTube link," and a link preview shows up, you're probably familiar with watching a YouTube video on the feed, but that is not the best way to get organic reach on Facebook because they don't want it, they don't want that content on the top. They want native upload at the top. So you see where there's like, sort of this issue of which one do I care about more? I could just upload the video to Facebook too. Well great, but you're not gonna get views on YouTube now because you didn't make anybody move anywhere. That link is gonna be really tough, but we can still kind of find ways around it. What I like to do is use the custom thumbnail and a good caption to make that link a little bit more worth the while of a couple of people that I know will probably see the update and hit the like button and give me some comments and help me try to beat out that algorithm that's gonna make a YouTube link suffer. But the big thing here is there is still a native upload, but it's a photo. You're still uploading something. There's a photo getting uploaded and it's a photo with a caption rather than a status update with a link. You see the difference there? Technically, probably the same on Facebook's end because they're super duper smart people over there, but this is how you make it more visually compelling where they might want to give it a little bit more organic reach. Native video obviously is gonna be your best bet here and we're gonna explore more of that. This is an example of what I was just talking about though. This is typical practice for me. I use my thumbnail. This copy is extremely useful when you're competing on the news feed, and then I let them know in the caption what the name of the video is, and the YouTube watch link. So just depending on, this one did okay in terms of likes because there were comments and things going on, and this is a topic people love to hear about. So it did okay on the news feed, but if I would have just posted this link and gotten a link preview, super, people can watch the video on Facebook, but YouTube didn't like it that much because they'd rather they be on YouTube, not Facebook. And Facebook doesn't like it because they would rather have something else. Native upload looks a lot more like this. So I'm sitting here talking and obviously you can hear it at this poin because you've expanded the video and you're in the experience now. I just think it's so difficult to watch video on Facebook because things are pinging you everywhere about notifications, so that's why I think we see kind of a low retention rate there a lot of the times, but this is going to fare better than a photo with anything in it just because you uploaded it natively.