The Ultimate social video starter guide – Infographic

The dawn of video sharing sites introduced the world to a series of potentials that it had previously never experienced. Millions of hours of video are uploaded to sites like YouTube and Vimeo on a monthly basis, and YouTube receives well over a billion unique visits per month. The videos provide visitors with virtually anything that they need to look for, and have become resources that are growing as their users’ demands shift.

With the popularity of video sharing sites comes the potential for monetization of the process. Brands, small businesses, even people realized that they could be using the popularity of videos to create like-minded content, content that would be shared widely and enjoyed by the maximum number of eyes. It was realizations like this that led to the rise in a new brand of marketing that focused on harnessing the power of video sharing, while integrating it with a concerted social media strategy. Thus, social video marketing was born.

This social video starter guide infographic, provided by TollFreeForwarding.com, provides a how-to guide for exploiting the wild popularity of social video sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Google Hangouts, Instagram, and Vine. It explores how social video sites have become a major component of the online marketing medium, and why so many are succeeding because of it.

Let’s take a look at this social video starter guide  and how you can leverage these social video sites to help grow your business.

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How to use Shortstack to display YouTube or Vimeo videos on your Facebook Page

Does your business create a lot of YouTube or Vimeo videos?

Instead of letting them sit on your video channels, you can create a Facebook landing page video wall to display them.

Why create a Facebook landing page tab to display videos?

By having a Facebook landing page tab to display your YouTube or Vimeo videos, you have one place to direct fans.

This way they can see all of your videos in one place.

What is great about the method we are going to teach you is that you can choose to display all of your videos, choose specific playlists, and more.

This way you can customize the experience for fans based on what is important on your video channels.

Example of videos from YouTube embedded on a Facebook Page

YouTube videos on a Facebook landing page tab
Example of videos on a Facebook Page using Shortstack.

Let’s get started teaching you how to display your videos from YouTube or Vimeo on your Facebook Page using Shortstack.

Display YouTube videos on your Facebook Page using Shortstack

To display your YouTube videos on your Facebook Page with the help of Shortstack, watch this video tutorial.

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Opting out of Google shared endorsements

How do you feel about Google sharing your profile in something called Google shared endorsements?

What are Google shared endorsements?

Google shared endorsements for reviews
Example of Google shared endorsements in product reviews.

Shared endorsements are a way for Google to share reviews and recommendations across Google products like YouTube, Google Maps, and the Google Play music store.

With shared endorsements, Google will use your Google Plus profile and name when your friends are browsing businesses, products, and websites to help boost recommendations.

By seeing what your friends like (and don’t like), this can help bring social proof and influence user decisions.

While shared endorsements are a great way to use social proof to influence user decisions, not everyone wants their photo and name displayed though.

The great thing is that Google makes it very easy to opt-out of Google shared endorsements.

To opt-out of Google shared endorsements, follow the instructions below.

How to opt-out of Google shared endorsements

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Grow your views with a YouTube subscribe button – Video

Publishing content on YouTube is a great way to grow your presence using video. Unfortunately, the number of views you get can be inconsistent. One easy, but powerful way to improve your views is to add a YouTube subscribe button to your site.

YouTube subscribe button

Adding a YouTube subscribe button is a great way to let your blog readers know that you have a YouTube presence. Also, each time you upload a new video, your subscribers are notified.

This can lead to a significantly consistent number of views each time you upload a YouTube video.

How to add a YouTube subscribe button to your blog

Continue reading Grow your views with a YouTube subscribe button – Video

5 Reasons Why You Should Unlink YouTube and Twitter

Joining both YouTube and Twitter (and I don’t mean connecting the two) can have tremendous benefits for your business:

So why am I giving you 5 Reasons Why You Should Unlink YouTube and Twitter?

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Everything I Need to Know About Social Media, I Learned From Football

Blue 42, hut hut, hike.  Who’s ready for some Football? With the NFL Playoffs set, I put together this fun (and handy) infographic to help explain social media in terms of Football.

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The State of Social Media in 2012

2012 was a HUGE year for social media – especially for mobile.  Twitter revamped their mobile app, Facebook followed suit and overhauled Facebook for iOS (which was sorely needed). Then, not to be outdone, Pinterest launched business pages for Pinterest, which allowed businesses to create their own accounts that didn’t require a complex way to squeeze your business into the first name and last name fields (finally).

Besides mobile, 2012 was also big for investors as well, as Facebook went public – and who can forget about Facebook Timeline, which also launched in 2012 – I know, it’s hard to remember all the way back to January 2012.

So what else happened with social media in 2012? Take a look at this infographic on everything that happened in social media in 2012.

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5 ways to grow your business with YouTube

Growing your business with YouTube

When you mention the terms, social media and business, a lot of people instantly conjure up images of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+ – along with a long list of questions.  What they often forget is that while these are social networks aimed at curating content from around the web, you have to have content to share on them to keep them growing.  Enter YouTube, an online video sharing community.

In addition to being the number two search engine (behind Google), YouTube is a tremendous social media tool where you can create your own online videos, build an audience, and drive traffic back to your business in a number of ways – by posting a video on your favorite social networks like Facebook or Twitter, encouraging visitors to check out your website, sign-up for your newsletter or as a way to leverage word of mouth marketing where viewers tell their friends about your video.

YouTube Beginnings

When I first got started making YouTube videos I’ll admit, I was pretty scared. Some of the questions I wondered about were if I could amass any considerable number of views – I also had a lot of questions about YouTube videos – will viewers like my content, will I even get viewers and how do I deal with comments and so on.

These are questions that anyone who is just getting started with online video might ask themselves.  But just two years later (and 750,000+ views), I’m happy to say that I enjoy making videos – almost more than blogging. And it’s not because I’m shy or anything. I just find they allow me to express my creativity through story-telling along with the creativity that goes into writing each video.

So to help you out, I’ve come up with 5 ways you can use YouTube to grow your small, medium, or large business.

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How to find your YouTube channel RSS feed

Just like your blog, your YouTube channel has its own RSS feed. What this means is that you can now see updates as they’re happening from your favorite YouTube channels.

This is good news for anyone who uses an RSS feed reader such as Pulse to consume their favorite websites and blogs from their smartphone because now, instead of going to check out your favorite YouTube channel to see if they have uploaded any new videos, you can access the YouTube channels RSS feed to see any recent updates anytime.  Here’s an example of my YouTube channel RSS feed.

Example of YouTube channel RSS Feed

What’s included in a YouTube channel RSS feed

  • Video title
  • Date uploaded
  • Length of video
  • Video thumbnail
  • Video description
  • Number of views
  • Ratings

What’s not included in a YouTube channel RSS feed

  • Keywords
  • Playlists videos are added to
  • Number of subscribers

If you’ll notice, it is very important to fill-in as much descriptive information about your YouTube videos and to include a custom YouTube video thumbnail because this information is pulled into RSS feed aggregators such as Google News and Pulse. Without a custom YouTube video thumbnail your videos won’t be as eye-catching to readers. If you don’t include a description or title for your video, RSS feed readers might not pick-up your video so you’ll want to be sure include this in your YouTube videos.

Enough about what is and is not included in a YouTube channel RSS feed.  How do I find a YouTube channel RSS feed?

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View and send tweets to iOS contacts

Now that you’ve purchased your first iOS device (iPhone, iPad or iPad Mini) and taken the time to import or add phone numbers and addresses to all of your contacts, one important area you don’t want to overlook is to add in your contacts Twitter username.

Why add a Twitter username to your contacts?

By adding a contacts Twitter username, this allows you the opportunity to easily view tweets from your friend right from your contacts. This also makes it easy to send your contact a tweet right from your contacts screen as well.

How to view and send a tweet to iOS contacts

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