Uploading your video on YouTube is probably the most important thing you can do given the “game over” traffic and market share YouTube currently has in the online video sharing game…We’ll talk more about this later when we cover YouTube in more depth in future posts.  However, even if you put a compelling video worth watching up on YouTube (or any other video sharing/social media site or your own website), it’s important to understand that this is really just the beginning of getting your video viewed.  It does help to post your video to multiple video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube, Dailymotion.com, Break.com) and multiple social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest), and to “content” sharing sites such as tripfilms.com and tripadvisor.com.  All of these sites will increase the likelihood of your video being seen.  However, the real power of Internet reach and exposure occurs when others, particularly online opinion leaders (or trust agents as they are sometimes referred to), decide to talk about your video and share a link to your video through social media channels or their own blogs.

Sharing links to videos and other content is a common practice on the Internet.  Close to 2/3’s of online video viewers share links to videos that they have found online with others…it’s a higher percentage with the younger demographic, and a bit lower with the older demographic.  The rough breakdown of where videos are discovered is ~45% on video sharing sites, 45% on blogs,, 5% in search engines, and 5% on social networks (this data is from 2009; we expect that the percentage for social media sites to be higher today).

If the right people, who have large number of followers, decide to share a link to your video, the number of people who will view your video increases by several orders of magnitude.  Video marketers need to identify who these trust agents are in their particular business areas and then work to cultivate relationships with those opinion leaders.  These opinion leaders have more marketing clout than the marketing departments of large companies.  The opinion leaders are always looking for fresh content to share with their followers as their ability to continue to be an opinion leader with a large following depends on this.  However, marketers can’t just assume that these leaders will find their video or be willing to share their video.  It’s important to cultivate relationships with these leaders by subscribing to their blogs, and sharing useful information with them overtime.

While there is a lot of interest in creating a video that will go viral, the reality now is that very few videos actually go viral…there is just too much video content being uploaded to the web everyday (more than 10 million per week).  Therefore, video marketers should not worry too much about making a video that will go viral.  The focus should be on creating a good video that gets the right message out and marketing appropriately in a variety of channels including your own website, social media sites where you have a presence, including the video in your customer email campaigns, sharing the video at industry events, and promoting the video to opinion leaders in your space.  The video does not have to go viral to successfully support your marketing needs.