Since the introduction of Universal or Blended search last year, where images and videos can now show up alongside the regular search listings, it makes sense for businesses to go ahead and work on getting videos and images indexed and ranked by the search engines, if for no other reason than to take up more of that valuable search engine shelf space.

But how can you do it for your company? Videos take time and money to produce don’t they? After all, if you want it to look good you need to have a flashy title sequence, and so on. Well, not really, as long as what you say is relevant and interesting enough. The lack of flashiness doesn’t hurt, in fact it may even help you as viewers may see your home produced video as being more real to them.

These days most laptops come with a built in webcam, so there’s no real excuse not to go ahead and record something. Your first few efforts don’t even have to go on the web, use them as practice, finding out what works and what doesn’t. After all, it may be disconcerting for you the first time you’re looking at the screen and you turn left while the image turns right…

How long does it take? Well this took 5 minutes to write the script, and substantially less to record. In fact I expect it’ll take longer to upload this video than it’s taken to create.

What do you do after you record and upload the video? Well, you need to make sure you use the right keywords when you upload it, so that the engines know what it’s about. You can link to it, or easily embed it on your blog or site, encouraging people to comment on and / or rate the video. If it’s good enough people will link to it, or embed it themselves on their sites. On some video sites, such as YouTube, you can create a channel which people can subscribe to, so they know whenever you release a new video.

More likely than not you won’t have an instant viral hit on your hands, but that’s fine. If you can use your videos to either build up or engage an existing user base, a base of people who are interested in your company, products or cause, then, search engines aside, that’s a pretty good tool that you should be using…

Filed under: Social Marketing on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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