How Your Brand Can Win at Facebook Live

Video content is like a hurricane running over anything in its path. “People watch more than 100 million hours of video each day” – sites Simple Measured. Facebook Live has jumped into the arena of video contenders, and it is not taking the fight lightly. But before we weigh the brand benefits of Live video, let’s remember the difference.

Facebook Live is a live broadcast that brands and advertisers can make available from anywhere at anytime to their audience (assuming there is a good connection – Wi-Fi is recommended). It is an opportunity to engage in real time like any live news broadcast or show. And the benefits (partially) include:

  • The Live functionality is all within the Facebook App. Nowadays when it is hard enough to get a consumer to download yet another app, this is a huge win.
  • Brands can broadcast the live session, save it to their channel, and also share it directly to their feed for a recap for those who missed it.
  • Unlike Snapchat or Stories, Live sessions do not disappear.

And of course there are some brands really kicking butt at it lately. Here are two to learn from in regards to creativity and launching new products.

TasteMade- Creativity

A brand known well for its cooking recipes and how-to content on food and drink – took it one step further. Instead of the regular “lets make XYZ” Tastemade made their content fun and creative with a new twist. All their food was miniature (1/12 the size of its regular formats). Sounds silly, but the content is unique and engaging and has given TasteMade a new way to resonate with their audience that goes beyond the regular how-to.

Dunkin Donuts – New Products

Dunkin Donuts, is already a beloved brand where people will really do “run on Dunkin” with their devotion. So what did Dunkin do to create even more ways to promote engagement and loyalty? It allowed a vehicle through Live video for their biggest (and newest) fans to see how they come up with new products, and demonstrate it live. For example, they put together a “donut-themed wedding cake” during a live session. This was unique and a way for their audience members to engage with them in a way that is behind the scenes, and not their norm. According to Melanie Cohn (Social media manager, Dunkin Donuts) on Marketingland – “Our first video provided fans with a behind-the-scenes look into our kitchen for Valentine’s Day, featuring our culinary team preparing a cake made from heart-shaped donuts, and introduced a special February Dunkin’ Hearts Love contest, offering engaged couples a chance to win $10,000 for sharing their story of how their sweetheart proposed.” So in addition to being unique and showing another side to the brand, there was an incentive to watch and the audience will be even more excited to see what will happen next.

 

Before you go, here are a few more nuggets of wisdom to understand why Live is the new video platform.

Video is not going anywhere. According to eMarketer “Facebook…recently reporting that video was a big reason for a strong quarter. The site said it saw eight billion video views a day from 500 million users. Taking queues from YouTube, the company has started to slip in ads to these videos, thus the strong results.” So what does that mean? Video is the wave of digital future. And if you are not sure, just take a look at your Facebook newsfeed and see how many of the posts you see are videos.

When it comes to Live video, specifically according to to Simply Measured: Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes Facebook will be mostly composed of videos by 2020. Considering that, check out these incredible Facebook Live statistics:

  • Facebook Live videos are watched3 times longer than regular videos
  • Native Facebook videoshave a 13% organic reach and 6.3% engagement rate (much higher than the 1-3% you get on other platforms)

Now it is your brand team’s turn. Ready, set, Live.

 Note: This was originally written for Socialnomics. 
Image source: Pixabay

Five Easy to Use Tips to Optimize your Brand’s YouTube Channel

 

StartUp FASHION Business Optimizing YouTube Channel

Nowadays with so many video content options from Instagram and Vine — it’s easy to forget about YouTube. However, it is still one of the largest search engines on the web and can be perfect for enabling your video content to be discovered, consumed, and shared across channels.

We’ve spoken before about the value of video content for your fashion brand, but how about optimizing your video content so people can find it?

Before jumping in or even if you already have, make sure you are optimizing your brand’s YouTube channel…

  1. Channel Title and Description – Having an easy to remember channel name is best, especially when people are using the search bar to find it. The description is helpful for SEO purposes, and it is key to remember that the first few sentences are seen most often (as the rest gets cut off unless you click for a full description). So make sure that the beginning is helpful in understanding the objective of your YouTube channel.
  2. Video Title and Description – Similar to the channel title and description, not only is it important to utilize keywords for SEO purposes, but it’s helpful to make it easy for people to know what the video is. If it’s too obscure, less people may click on it when searching; and in turn less people may share.
  3. Video Transcript – This may seem like a silly tiresome thing you have to do, but remember YouTube is a search engine. Capitalize on those keywords and SEO value of being able to use them in the transcript as well.

To read the rest of my tips, check out original and full post on Startup Fashion.

 

Building Community through Storytelling Apps Like Cowbird, YouTube and Tumblr

Many brands today are still figuring out how to tell their story, show the human side of the brand, and connect with their audience on a deeper level than just their products and services. If that isn’t hard enough, there are a myriad of avenues by which to do so…should your brand use Facebook, a blog, YouTube,  Pinterest, none, or all of the above? It’s important for each brand to see where their audience is first, and use the tools that most resonate with their audience and engages them where they prefer to be engaged. However, it doesn’t hurt to try new tools and see if they “fit” the brand’s identity as well as the audience. Test and Learn – great motto.

3 Tools to consider and see if they “fit” and why:

(1) Cowbird - Use photos, text, and/or sound to tell the story of a moment in time, a brand, a product, a service, a person who works there, a consumer, or what have you. Video isn’t available (as of yet), and it’s only a web service (although apparently mobile friendly), but it appears to have a growing community as photos are so easily uploaded and shared. People love to tell “their story” and brands can collaborate with cowbird to tell a “saga” or something more. However there is currently no advertising as they are trying to keep it pure to contributors. Benefit for brands? A community of people who are engrossed in stories and visual content – and ones who will share, and engage with it via “likes” or “re-telling” a story (basically like a re-blog on twitter, which is a high value action on this platform). Also the potential opportunity to partner with Cowbird for feature content.

(2) YouTube: The Archive and the storytelling vehicle that has lasted the test of time. Video like photos are a great tool to tell a brand’s story. It can be used to tell a six second snippet (the “vine” rage) or it can be longer and tell a consumer’s journey, a sneak peek on a product line, the inside scoop on an event, or how and why an employee loves every moment of working for a particular brand. Whatever the video may be – it is a piece of the brand – and it’s story. Not sure how to break into video content? Not sure if you can afford it? Start small; start simple but start with a content strategy on how that video will amplify your current brand’s story and/or revive it from the dead. Did I mention it’s only one of the largest search engine’s on the web? Cough Cough – SEO (huge perk).

Great Example: The Lego Story [Watch The Video]

(3) tumblr - a blogging platform and so much more for brands and consumer alike. From fashion brands like Nordstrom to finance brands like American Express, tumblr has become a place to not just tell a story but allow the consumer to see a different side of the brand; and of course explore and engage with fun, digestible content – from posts to photos to videos and more.

ProTip: when using a platform like tumblr (or your blogging place of choice) always consider the amount of time and amount of content your brand has for both quality and frequency. Your audience will expect fresh, new, engaging content on a consistent basis.

note: this post was originally written for Social Media Club and my original post can be found here.

How to: Take Advantage of Vine Video App for your Fashion Brand

vine video app

Have you encountered Vine yet? This short video app is already being utilized by brands and consumers alike due to its many advantages, two of which are simplicity and ease of use.

As a brand owner, you should think about how Vine could possibly work with your current social media strategy.

Here are 5 advantages Vine has for brand content across the fashion industry:

Short, Digestible Content

Vine takes quick snippets of video content and stitches them together to create a quick 6 second snapshot of video.

The fact that you don’t need continues footage but instead can use 3 snippets stitched together is very cool. It allows a brand to take 3 different views of its new fashion line or fashion show, rather than just one at time. It also allows the consumer to get more than just one view of a product or event.

Utilizing Your Twitter Audience

Since you can sign up through Twitter, it makes it simple to follow any of your twitter followers who are also on vine.

In addition, a brand can easily share Vine content on Twitter once it’s been recorded. It can also be shared on Facebook. The ease of integration is key for content in order to release it just as quickly as it’s recorded.

Ease of Use

The steps to setting up an account, shooting your first video, and sharing are as simple as one, two, three. The process has that same easy flow as Instagram, but makes it possible to share content on other channels.

There are also other Vine tools like VineIt that are being released (not necessarily connected with the Vine team) that help find and view videos, as well as integrate with Tumblr. Since so many fashion brands utilize Tumblr, it’s awesome that Vine can be uploaded or embedded in there too.

To read about key tactics fashion brands can utilize for their Vine videos alongside their digital strategy, read my full post on Startup Fashion. Hint – there are some great examples!