VIDEO MARKETING CHANNELS PROMOTION

ShortformTV

Video marketing channels promotion: Learning to make your own video channel can be a daunting task.  Yet, Videos seem to be the best attention getter as well as a method of teaching.  Youtube  is the best video sharing platform in my opinion.  I have an overall passion for finding something to watch on Youtube so much, sometimes I forget TV ever existed.  Yet, what to do when Youtube doesn’t bring up exactly what you were looking for?  Each culture usually has its own set of jokes and humor but there are certain materials (funny pets, fail videos, etc.) that are universally understood across all cultural backgrounds.

WHAT IS SHORTFORM?

ShortForm is a new entertainment medium that is here to stay delivering continuous channels of the best videos from anywhere on the web, curated by a growing community of VJ’s just like you.  ShortForm viewers subscribe to channels of interest, lean back, and enjoy a continuous stream of videos. Each channel can have up to 2 categories.

“Thankfully, content curation has come to video: ShortForm shows it’s here to stay.”  -TECHCRUNCH

SHORTFORM PARTNERS

From motorcycles to music and Mary-Kate to mobile apps, ShortForm users are curating and embedding some of the most innovative channels on the web. ShortfromTV is the solution.  ShortformTV has had numerous video contests with  College Humor and Google I/O Contest (Google’s largest annual developer conference).  ShortForm has been selected to participate in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O, Google’s developer conference.  ShortForm powers another contest this week with the Best Dorkly Bits, a collection of videos from CollegeHumor’s over-the-top spoof of video games.

Best Video Distribution Methods:

1) I think I can figure this out!!!: Stumbleupon

StumbleUpon is a great social site because it features a diverse crowd that spans hundreds of topics and thousands of tags.  StumbleUpon can work well for ANY site and shouldn’t be overlooked in any social media strategies.  This is a quick list that you can reference before submitting (called “discovering” on the site) anything to StumbleUpon:

• Use Proper Tags
  Tagging allows for you to label your content for consumption by others.  If other users are a fan of “web-design” and you use that tag, they will have a much higher probability to getting found on StumbleUpon.  The tags page shows tags that are recently hot and most popular all the time.
• Use Multiple Tags
  By leveraging as many different tags, you can give your content a much higher chance of getting traffic and momentum through the various different types of users. For instance, an infographic about how much NFL players make per year could be popular with the tags:

football, sports, NFL, salaries, wealth

If you have a StumbleAds account, you can also view the number of users who are subscribed to different categories.  Using this, you can make sure to include a few of the tags with large subscribers! Your Stumble Upon strategy should be to like a lot of things.  Similar to Reddit, you have to build up your account on StumbleUpon by submitting various non-ShortForm links to increase the value of your account. But on StumbleUpon, there is an easier way

Steps to Success!:

1. go to http://www.stumbleupon.com/favorites,

2. log into your account

3. click on the yellow “Stumble” button. On the next page, you will see a toolbar at the top of the page. Every time you click on the “Stumble” button on the toolbar it will show you a new site, and every time that you click on the “I like it!” button that site will be added into your account as a “Favorite.”

4. Post on categories that have at least 50K subscriber.http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumblers/followers

5. The best ratio is to Like ONE out of every TEN websites that you Stumble across to add it as a “Favorite.” That way you will be seen as a credible account with legitimate interests. Do this until you have 100+ Favorites in your account.

6. Submit a ShortForm link into your StumbleUpon account http://www.stumbleupon.com/favorites, and click on the “Add a Site” button in the middle of the page. This will open up a form.

7. Tagging: http://www.stumbleupon.com/tag/ show which tags are the most popular so you should target your links to them, tagging your link by the correct tag words is key to success because other Stumblers will vote your link down if it is tagged by the wrong categories.

Stumbleupoon Ethics:

Do not share any ShortForm links in your StumbleUpon account until you have at least 100+ Favorites in your account, write a 50+ review and even then share them in moderation. Otherwise, you risk getting your StumbleUpon account flagged and banned.  don’t spam shortform in stumbleupon.

Follow the accounts under the “Followers,” “Visitors,” and “Suggestions” tab by clicking on their icons and clicking the green “Follow” button on the right side of the page. Please note that there is a daily limit of how many accounts you can follow.

“Use simple, but captivating titles.”

• Submit It to the Proper Topic
  Many times users may see a topic that has a large following or is extremely popular and they select that thinking it will lead to the most exposure.  Not the case.  If submitting to incorrect categories, you will most likely receive fewer positive votes and more negative votes.  Use the drop down menu if none of the standard categories work for you.

• Leverage Popular Friends

• Share with your Friends
  You can use the “share” function to send your stories directly to your friends.  Recipients will be notified that they havea new item to be stumbled:
  

• Don’t Spam
  Like any social site, spamming the site by submitting Digg/Reddit links, using incorrect categories or sharing every story will be frowned upon.  Be a good user and add value to the community.  If you aren’t adding value,  you probably won’t see much coming back to your campaigns either.

• Use StumbleUpon Groups
  A detailed list of groups can be found here and the most popular groups can be found here.  Many times these groups have active discussions where you can talk to fellow members and moderators.  Moderators can also post links to sites so make friends with them!  Group activity has been declining sharply since its inception, but it is always better to try every avenue possible.

http://shortformintern.blogspot.com/2011/03/channel-promotion-tips.html

3) Forums

Forums is also a good source for views.  http://www.big-boards.com/ best website to find the biggest forum in the world.  Instead of the view spikes of Reddit, links on StumbleUpon slowly ascend from my experience. So as you make more and more discoveries the few views they all get can add up. I’m sure if you like 200 different sites using the StumbleUpon, add your friends on Facebook who use stumbleupon and then submit a video every day, you should definitely break 100 views easily.  Also, don’t forget to review each submission that increases the chance of it getting views sooner. Its not a requirement, but I’d recommend it. Another great source to get views is relevant blogs and forums. Forums are especially effective because you can either post your video link as a new topic or as a reply to an existing topic. When that topic thread starts to sink, you can bump it up to the top of the forum again by replying to it. Stefan discovered this great website, Big-boards.com (http://directory.big-boards.com/) that lists out all the top forums on any topic.   www.alltop.com,http://technorati.com/blogs/directory, http://blogs.botw.org,http://portal.eatonweb.com, and http://www.bloggernity.com. For a list of the top forums on any topic, check out http://directory.big-boards.com

To post in most forums you would need to create an account there. If you speak a foreign language, you can also post your video links on foreign-language forums in the US or anywhere in the world. Avoid forums located in countries where YouTube is blocked, such as mainland China, because ShortForm won’t be able to load the videos. So find a couple of forums that are relevant to the content in your channel, and start posting! Excited to see how many views you guys can get from these forums.  I have put together a list of tips on how to find, select, and pitch these bloggers in my “Channel Pitch to Bloggers” document at http://shortformintern.blogspot.com/2011/03/channel-pitch-to-bloggers.html At the end of the page is a sample pitch that I wrote which you can edit and use for your purpose–the words in red are to be changed to fit your channel. Give it a try and let me know how it goes. Please let me know once a blogger embeds your channel in their blog so I can let our management team know about your great accomplishment!

4) Reddit

On Reddit, sometimes the moderators in the main categories (or “reddits”) would be somewhat hostile towards your ShortForm links because they want videos to be from their original sources (YouTube, Vimeo) rather than from an aggregator website like us. It is typical of them to be that way and criticize or downvote your ShortForm links. One way to avoid this is to post your ShortForm links to other smaller categories and not to the main categories shown on the top gray bar on Reddit’s homepage. Definitely don’t post your ShortForm links to the “reddit.com,” “videos,” and “gaming” categories.

Here is a list of all the categories on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/reddits/ Click on “Next” at the bottom of the page to go to the next page. To post a link to a certain category, simply put that category’s name in the “reddit” field of the “Submit a Link” form. Always vary up on the categories that you post your ShortForm links to and never post them to the same category continuously.

6) Digg

Digg works similarly to StumbleUpon and Reddit in that users will submit links to be voted up or down by its community, and the links with more up-votes (called “Diggs”) will rank higher on its website and shown to more visitors. The same tips and strategies apply to Digg: you would need to build up your Digg account with various non-ShortForm links and getting votes on them to increase the value of your Digg account, and you would need to friend other Digg users and vote up and comment on their links so that they would return the favor for you. Here are two good articles on how to get views from Digg:http://mashable.com/2009/01/20/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-digg/ andhttp://www.imguru.biz/internet-marketing/social-networks/90-digg-trafic-how-to-get-traffic-from-diggcom.html

5) Twitter

Twitter audience and it’s here at http://pushingsocial.com/grow-your-twitter-audience-with-smarter-questions