You can create the best video content known to man, but if it isn’t reaching a wide and diverse audience, what good is it to anyone?
Many brands go to great lengths to develop the kind of high-quality content that has the ability to turn heads, but when it comes to actually getting it seen, they find themselves completely and utterly stumped.
YouTube
Naturally, YouTube is most people’s go-to site for uploading any video content. It is by far the biggest video content hub on the web, with some amazing stats, and creating a YouTube channel is certainly a great way to show off your work to the world. But YouTube isn’t the only option. Listed here are a selection of alternative video hosting platforms; these really are worthwhile investigating if you’re aiming to broaden your reach.
Wistia
Wistia is the platform that we here at Spark Engine use – so you know it must be doing something right! Wistia is a great choice for brand owners because it gives them a sense of control over how they market their content. For example, users can integrate a call to action (with a hyperlink and social media sharing buttons) into their video, and are even granted a variety of interactive text options. Another great feature is what they call ‘turnstiles’, this is where you can add email capture forms to appear at specific parts of the video. This is really useful for businesses who are looking to build their email list. What’s more, Wistia allows users to see which parts of the video have been viewed consistently by audiences, which bits have been skipped, and which bits have not been viewed at all. The platform is aimed specifically at businesses, and offers the opportunity to push video content in a way that’s genuinely useful for marketers, as well as allowing them to see what’s working and what’s not.
One of the strongest features is video SEO. Video (made correctly) can yield significant benefits to your SEO efforts. Wistia offers several SEO tools for video, including video sitemaps to integrate into your website. This means that all those carefully chosen keywords you use across your website that help your organic search engine rankings can be enhanced by including them in the videos description. Finally, and this is a cool feature, you can specify what URL your video is linked to when accessed through a search engine. This might sound simple, but those super effective rich snippets usually link through to YouTube/Vimeo pages, which is great but the viewer then has to click through again to get to your website. Wistia allows you to have these link straight through to your website!
Vimeo
Perhaps the most similar platform to YouTube on this list, in many ways Vimeo can be considered to be the giant upload site’s younger, quieter brother. However, young and quiet doesn’t mean worse. In fact, Vimeo has developed a reputation for harbouring some of the highest quality video content on the web over the past few years, and many budding video content producers and filmmakers are choosing to broadcast their content here, rather than on YouTube. Signing up for a premium account on Vimeo is a tad expensive, but it’s also worth your while as you’ll be granted unlimited bandwidth and access to all kinds of terrific stats and evaluation of your content.
Viewbix
Viewbix is more heavily geared to advertisers than some of the more mainstream video platforms. Instead of merely allowing users to upload video content, it lets them insert a range of interactive marketing elements into their videos as well. For example, users can include a wide variety of apps including email capture, calls to action and social media buttons in the video, and are promised a high degree of engagement from viewers as a result.
SproutVideo
Sprout is another video hosting site that’s terrific for determining which parts of your content might be working and which ones are failing. You can obtain detailed analysis for each individual viewer on this platform, which means you can see exactly how they behaved when they viewed your material. This information can then be used to tweak the content accordingly and increase viewer engagement.
Spark Engine
Spark Engine is a full-service video production agency based in London that specialise in making videos people actually want to watch. We can help you create, produce and distribute stunning video content to help transform your brand story, service or message into a mesmerising spectacle.
Give us a call today on 0330 043 0120 to see how we can help you increase audience engagement.
