So Naomi Osaka won the US Open 30 minutes ago and you want to make a branded online video promoting her win. You chat up your friends here at Sightworthy and we send back the final produced 10 second, optimized for social video within 3 hours.

Now what? What channels should you post across, and how should you do it to promote engagement? We get these questions a lot from customers, so we put an overview below to help you market your video online across social efficiently and effectively. Because whether or not you’re celebrating a badass national champion or launching a B2B product, your promoting across social shouldn’t be what holds up your creative workflow.

Below we discuss how to leverage the top social platforms for video marketing. Then we get into how to optimize them for SEO.

Social Media Platforms 101

I highly advise you to post your online video to multiple platforms to see where you get the most traction – sort of like A/B testing – so you can find the optimal strategy, know where your audience engages the most and exceed your KPIs.

Check out tips & tricks for these recommended platforms:

Facebook: Best for heightened visibility (2B+ users across all demographics), ideal for reaching people who are under 30, great for brand awareness and creating custom videos that align with trending conversations.

Instagram: Great opportunity for consumer brands to publish aspirational content that simultaneously links directly to specific products. Within one platform, Instagram offers Stories, posts and highlights to engage authentically with customers. The biggest demographic is millennials. Often used for behind the scenes, company culture and event videos. Here is how it’s done.

IGTV: This new platform has already proven to be very useful for brands. More and more are adopting IGTV due to rising popularity and success with vertical video; videos live on your channel (vs Instagram Stories, which disappear after 24 hrs), and you can even add links in your captions, offering another opportunity for click-backs and traffic to your website. Check out this IGTV we made to help you engage with your audience!

Twitter: Great for capitalizing on trending news or during events in real-time (Airbnb got 3.6M views on a live Periscope debuting a Kauai property) & breaking industry news. Add the #trendinghashtag to capitalize on moments and position yourself consistently as a thought leader in your industry.

LinkedIn: Best for B2B marketing, reaching decision-makers and targeting specific professional industries and audiences, also as this platform is new and emerging, there’s a lot of white space and now is the best time to get in and experiment. See how it’s done,

YouTube: Upload every video you create here, since it’s still the second largest search engine and generates over 3 billion searches per month. Uploading your video to YouTube gives you a great opportunity to optimize for SEO and generate more organic views.

Vimeo: Another hosting platform that’s great to post your video and test against YouTube stats.

The Down-Low on SEO

Search Engine Optimization and social media go hand-in-hand: SEO can help with reach, and a strong social media presence can help with your search rankings, ultimately bringing you traffic and potential sales. All social content is indexable on Google, with the potential to increase your brand authority and rise in search engine rankings…getting you all of the views. Follow these tips below to make sure you’re taking full advantage of how much platforms like Google and Facebook favor video:

Publish Consistently and Intentionally: Each online video you create is another opportunity for brand engagement, leading to more shares and traffic that drive sales. On Instagram stories, post shorter 3-5 second videos that swipe up to link back to your website. On IGTV, you can link in the caption directly to your website. And on Instagram posts, with a business profile you can add product sale tags that will engage with viewers and lead them to the ultimate goal: sales. This way you are decreasing friction and enticing customers to take the next step and visit the exact item they desire, furthering (and tracking) their funnel behavior.

Upload Directly: If you’re distributing video on Facebook and LinkedIn, make sure you’re uploading it organically so it gets pushed up higher in people’s feeds.

Audience Participation: Encourage your viewers to interact by liking or commenting, sometimes posing a question or having a clever caption helps, the more engagement, the higher your video ranks in searches.

Research-Driven Content: Predict what your audience will search for, and make content that is relevant to those long-tail keywords. Google has a great tool – the Keyword Planner – check it out here!

Choose a good thumbnail for your video: A thumbnail in this context is the image or screen capture that showcases your video before it plays. This is make-it-or-break it, don’t skip! When it comes to video marketing, you can do all the SEO, but a good thumbnail is just as important to get clicks. Your video’s thumbnail is the first preview for your content, so you want it to be relatable, bold and eye-catching, and thinking about color, text usage and image quality. You can read more about this here.

With these tips, you should be more than set on devising a plan to improve your SEO strategies and social media presence. You’ve got a product that people want and content that people want to see, it’s just a matter of optimizing what you already have – that’s where we come in.

In video we vibe, from your local A/V Club president,

Chloe