This is a blog post to accompany a webinar series we recently launched titled Top Tips for Driving More Value with Video. The sessions highlight 10 advanced ways to make sure you're providing high quality video experiences efficiently and effectively. Below are some excerpts from the presentation, but be sure to sign up for a session to get access to the rest of the great information.
So you’ve purchased an online video platform, figured out how to deliver high-quality video content to your end users, and ironed out all kinks in your publishing workflow to make it as efficient as possible. The final step in this Top Tips series answers perhaps the most important question: “How do I make video work harder for my organization?” In other words, what steps can you take to make your video experience as effective as possible in terms of monetizing your video views? Here are a few tips that will help you take advantage of advanced Video Cloud features designed to increase the value of your video initiative:
Drive social traffic back to your site with hosting options
Video is a social medium, and social sharing is a great way to drive not just video views, but engagement as well. Video Cloud players come equipped with advanced social sharing features that make it easy to enable your viewers to share your content across the web and to social networks.
However, when you create a player in Video Cloud, we don’t know where on the Web you will embed it. As a result, the default behavior for our sharing buttons is to give your viewers a generic link.brightcove.com URL. This link will point potential viewers to a blank page, and though that page will include your content and your player – plus all branding, analytics, and advertising you may have set up in the video and player – it misses a valuable consequence of viewers sharing your content: driving traffic not just to your video but to your website as well.
To accomplish this, simply use the Hosting Options selection in the player settings. Just select “Host on Your URL” and add the URL on which you plan to embed the player. Once that’s done, the sharing buttons on your player will direct traffic to your website as well as your video content, encouraging viewers to browse other areas of your site and providing an opportunity to convert the viewer to a customer.
If you plan on embedding a single player on multiple URLs, however, the Hosting Options feature is not ideal – viewers will be upset if they end up sharing a link to a page other than the one they’re currently on. This is why we created a parameter – the linkBaseURL parameter – that overrides the URL you have set up in the Hosting Options with whatever value you choose. Click here for instructions on using the linkBaseURL parameter.
Increase brand impressions with a default viral player
One of Video Cloud’s sharing features is the “Blog This/Get Code” button, which lets viewers grab the embed code for the video they are currently watching and embed it on their own website or blog. This can be a powerful way to increase video views, as the more sites a video is distributed to the more likely it is to gain viewers.
Video Cloud lets you set a specific video player to be employed when a viewer uses the Blog This/Get Code feature, called the Default Viral Player. Because content shared this way appears on sites outside of your own domain, it’s a good idea to create a dedicated player for this role that takes advantage of Video Cloud’s various branding features – banner images, bumper videos, etc. If done correctly, your Default Viral Player will drive brand impressions and traffic back to your own domain as your content is distributed across the web. I’ve detailed how to set up a player for this purpose in another blog post: click here to read the post for further instructions.
Expose rendition links to enable viewers to download your asset and view it offline
Did you know that you can access direct URLs to each rendition of every asset in your account through the Studio UI? Just select a video in the Media Module, click on “Edit Settings,” choose the “Video Files” tab, select the rendition you’d like to download from the list, and click on the “Copy link” text under “Rendition URL.” Pasting this link into a browser will prompt you to download the file (with one exception – the Google Chrome browser will load the asset in a built-in video player; right-clicking in the video window exposes a download option).
This can be a godsend for publishers who, for whatever reason, have lost the source file for a video uploaded to Video Cloud – especially if they used the preserve source as rendition feature, which I detailed in a blog post recently. But this feature can also be used to present viewers with a “download and watch later” option, which can be ideal for viewers who travel frequently without an internet connection or who have a slow internet connection but still want to view a high-quality version of the content.
You can simply hard-code the download URL into a webpage, but Video Cloud also includes a Related Link option that would be ideal for this use case. The Related Link appears in the menu area of every Video Cloud player, and in certain player templates the Related Link has persistent real estate just below the video player. Surfacing a download link to your viewers can increase engagement by letting them view content on their own time, regardless of whether they have an internet connection when they are ready to watch.
To see these tips in action and to learn additional tricks that will help you manage content more effectively, publish assets more easily, and make video harder for you, be sure to sign up for a Top Tips for Driving More Value with Video webinar.