Promote that New Video on Social Networking Sites
You’re undoubtedly familiar with social networking sites; most
people are nowadays. Basically, they are sites such as MySpace or
Facebook where people with common interests may gather who
may have never met up in another way. In fact, YouTube is a social
networking site in the sense that it promotes communication via
the Internet among people with common interests. We’re going to
focus a lot on video promotion on these sites because they are
where so much of the Internet traffic is right now, and they offer
so many opportunities for easy promotion. But years before there
was a MySpace or Facebook, Internet users gathered on message
boards through a system called Usenet.
While Usenet is definitely a Web 1.0 technology, many people
still use it to communicate with others who share common inter-
ests. The easiest way to explore Usenet is through Google groups.
(Click the More button on the Google home page to get to this
area.) Amazingly, there are more than two million of these groups.
Surely there are sites where groups of people gather who would be
interested in your video’s topic. Take some time to get the lay of the
land, and if it seems as if members would be receptive to your mes-
sage, post it, and include a link to your latest video.
MySpace
Your MySpace page is all about you or your company, so why not
embed your YouTube creations into it? When you go
whole site is geared toward promoting Michael’s brand and his
YouTube presence. His bio mentions that he’s the host/writer/
producer of What the Buck?!, “the most popular show on YouTube.”
There’s a clickable banner that takes you to a Web site where you
can buy all sorts of What the Buck?! T-shirts and other merchan-
dise. By the way, we got to Michael’s MySpace page by clicking on
the link in the What the Buck?! box from his YouTube Channel
page.
Facebook and LinkedIn
As with MySpace, Facebook allows you to post all sorts of items
to your page, from links, to photos, to applications such as word
games, to videos. So embed your latest video on Facebook, too.
There’s also another way to promote your new videos on
Facebook: just click the Update Status button to let your friends
know about the video, as in “Just uploaded a new YouTube video
about how to get your book published.” Every time you update
your status your friends are notified when they log onto the site.
New features, according to David Mullings from the Realvibez
channel, make using status updates even better because you can
use a sort that only shows you status updates.
LinkedIn is an example of another social networki site with this sort of status
feature. We get regular updates from LinkedIn about who’s
connected to whom and who’s working on what. Mentioning your
video in this context lets you easily notify people who have shown
an interest in your work and what you’re up to. David also updates
his Blackberry status to do the same sort of updating and
promoting.
Twitter sounds a lot like “fritter,” as in fritter away your time. We
admit, we never quite “got” what Twitter’s appeal was until we re-
searched it.
you’re a Twitter subscriber, you’re supposed to supply brief but
frequent answers to the question: what are you doing?
What does all this have to do with YouTube? Twitter is another
way to communicate with your fan base. If people choose to follow
you on Twitter, they can receive your missives all throughout the
day. That way, they can really feel connected to you. Michael Buck-
ley announces on his YouTube Channel page that he “Loves to
Twitter all day! Follow me!” But don’t think Twitter is just for co-
medians; MBA holder David Mullings uses Twitter as one of his
promotional tools when launching a new video. YouTube itself uses
Twitter to provide its followers with “tweets on YouTube news, happeninsula.
