We often don't think about how we experience and find new content online, but it all comes from one place: shares. Shares are how content moves across social platforms like Facebook or Reddit, and shares dictate how we consume content. As video marketers, we are constantly fielding questions about how to promote your video online. It leads to the eternal question, "How do we get our video shared?"

Many marketers make the mistake of thinking that quality content shares itself. It isn't enough to make something great, post to YouTube, and wait for the view counts to roll in. Getting people to view and share your content requires a clear strategy, and a little elbow grease.

In this podcast, the Umault team discusses five strategies for getting your video shared. Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below to learn:

• Why your employees are one of your best tools, and how a new LinkedIn feature can help get them involved
• How brands should join online conversations on Twitter and other social networks
• Why you shouldn't be afraid to put some money behind your content to get it in front of the right audience
• How to find the right influencers for your market, and how to get them to share your content with their network

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Key quotes

"We all wish that it was as easy as just buying an email list, blasting it out and then becoming rich and famous. But it's a real personal, on-the-ground game. The more you can have your team share for you, the better you'll be." - Guy Bauer

"What we're talking about for the most part is, how do you earn it versus buy it? Because at the end of the day, if you've earned it, it goes a lot further than just another trophy that you picked up at Walmart for yourself." - Tory Merritt

"Shares give you credibility in the marketplace. On Facebook, a like is a very low commitment from your audience. But when you get a share, those people are putting a seal of approval on that content. If you're getting these influencers on their blog, on their Instagram, what have you, you are getting instant credibility for your content. The views that you do get on that video are going to be more targeted and the viewer will be more willing to think well of your brand." - Hope Morley

Resources, videos, and other stuff we talked about

About LinkedIn's new feature: Employee Notifications

Source for TikTok's user retention

PremiumBeat.com spot:

Chatbooks spot:

You can listen to the episode using the player embedded above, or you can read a full transcript below.

Episode transcript

Hope Morley:
Welcome to So You Need A Video, the only podcast...

Guy Bauer:
That we know of.

Hope Morley:
About simplifying your brand's sales message with video. I'm Hope Morley.

Guy Bauer:
I'm Guy Bauer.

Tory Merritt:
And I'm Tory Merritt.

Hope Morley:
And welcome to our episode this morning. We are talking about one of the biggest topics that we hear from our clients and that is how do you get people to watch and then share the video that you are creating? And Guy this morning has the top five ways to get your video shared.

Guy Bauer:
They're not the top five. They are five of many ways.

Hope Morley:
Five ways. Five good solid ways.

Guy Bauer:
Yeah.

Tory Merritt:
Five of the cool, not weirdo, ways of getting your videos shared.

Guy Bauer:
They are ethical. I think. If you're a Silicon Valley fan, they're "tethical." Yeah, and I guess the main theme of all five, I'm just kind of ruining the surprise. The main theme of all five is to go where the conversation is. So your video is not going to get shared if you just stand in a corner and talk to the wall. You actually have to metaphorically go into the party.

Hope Morley:
It's like meeting people.

Guy Bauer:
It's like meeting people. It's really weird, me included early on in our journey of trying to get exposure through our videos, I thought you just put it on YouTube, you keyword it, put the meta things in, and then it just takes care of itself. And no, that's just not the way it works is, you have to get out into the world and be a part of the conversation. So that's like the theme, the essence of all five.

Hope Morley:
Okay, well let's get started with number one.

Guy Bauer:
Number one. Actually, I'm going to make my number one number five.

Hope Morley:
All right, so number one, two.

Guy Bauer:
Okay. Yeah. Okay, so this is number one. Okay, so here we go. Number one is use the personal channels of you and your team. So not everything just has to be broadcasted through your company LinkedIn page or your company Vimeo or company YouTube thing. You can have your team post on their personal channels. You'll probably get more exposure and more reach organically using personal channels rather than business. For example, when we debuted our Umault rebrand, I posted on our LinkedIn page, which had a thousand followers, and then I also post it to my personal page, which I only really have like 400 connections.

Guy Bauer:
The view count and the exposure on my personal page was way higher than the business page because LinkedIn kind of pushes the personal rather than so much the business. The same thing with Facebook and my Instagram. Personal channels performed a lot better than the business channels just because people know you. So all members of your marketing team or your sales team should be encouraged to post the video on their channels and you'll see that the exposure and the shareability and the engagement. This isn't your only strategy, but it is one of the many ways to get your video shared.

Hope Morley:
And most of your team members, especially if they've worked at other companies within the industry, they have connections that are within your industry or that are their clients so that they're reaching out to a lot of people who might not follow the company page, but they follow a person that they've connected with that's in that industry.

Tory Merritt:
Yeah. You forget how many people you've talked to from your first job on. "Oh yeah, I forgot I still have them on LinkedIn." And they ended up seeing it and their followers see it. That's what I've seen too, is stuff that I posted. I'm like, "Oh yeah, like so-and-so looked at that. I forgot." Not that I forgot they existed, but...

Hope Morley:
We won't tell...

Tory Merritt:
Taylor again. Taylor Swift strikes again, but you forget that you've been connected with them then ends up... A lot of leads we've seen come in just through people that we knew through other people.

Guy Bauer:
Yeah. We were talking about this I guess a couple of weeks ago that all of our biggest clients, our agency's biggest clients, are all from kind of personal relationships. They're not really just off the internet. Some have grown from an internet lead, but most of them, and maybe they're not people we knew, but they were people introduced by other people we knew. It's like sales and marketing is actually really personal. And anytime I have a drink with a salesperson and I bring this up, they're like, "Yeah, you know you're right!" Like it is. It's a lot more personal than we...

Guy Bauer:
We all wish that it was easy as just buying an email list and blasting it out and then becoming rich and famous. But it's a real personal on the ground game and so the more you can have your team share for you, the better you'll be. In fact, I believe LinkedIn just rolled out a new feature where there's a button on your company post. If you post on your company posts, it will notify all the people that are in your company to post on their personal feeds. So LinkedIn is even aware of it and built a tool around it.

Hope Morley:
Great.

Guy Bauer:
How was that number one? Was that a good one?

Hope Morley:
That was a good number one.

Guy Bauer:
Okay.

Hope Morley:
Let's see if number two can hold up to it.

Guy Bauer:
Alright? Number two is something I heard about years ago, like a decade ago, and every time I've tried it, it works and I kick myself for not doing it more, but this really does work. You go to search.twitter.com and on Twitter, people are talking about infinite topics. You can literally take the topic of your video. Say it's powder coating. You can type in powder coating into search.twitter.com and everyone that is mentioning powder coating or having a conversation about it is there right in front of you and you can just reply. It gives you a nice list. You reply from your Twitter account and you don't want to spam because there's a lot of other... My other tips involve like looking for a conversation. You're not just going and replying all with your video link.

Hope Morley:
With a generic, watch this video about powder coating.

Guy Bauer:
Yeah, that's not going to work. But what you do is join the conversation. Right? And you never know. It can go that way. The conversation may organically evolve in a way where you can say, "Hey, we made a video about this." Especially if your video addresses like a direct question that people are asking. You can get lots of shareability and also highly targeted views that way.

Hope Morley:
And if your video happens to be, it doesn't have to be, but if it happens to be a funny video that has a lot of industry in-jokes, that's where you're going to find the people in that industry that they're directly targeted and they're going to think that's funny. Years ago, Guy, you made a spec video for premiumbeat.com. Any of our listeners who are involved in video or audio will know this is a stock music site and that video went quote unquote viral because it was an industry in joke and everyone who saw it who used stock music thought it was hilarious. It is hilarious, but that's the type of video that would do really well in that sort of strategy because you're speaking to something that those people understand.

Guy Bauer:
And I promise you this wasn't planned between me and Hope, but the way that video went viral, it started using search.twitter.com.

Hope Morley:
I didn't even know that.

Guy Bauer:
And that's exactly how we got it to do that. We went out to the people asking questions or having conversations around stock music, so I just typed in stock music into search.twitter.com and then just join the conversation and it's kind of like, what's that jump rope thing where it's multiple...

Hope Morley:
Double Dutch.

Guy Bauer:
Double Dutch? It's kind of like Double Dutch. So the game is going and then you're just like waiting for the right time to jump in and once you jump in, there's multiple streams of conversations and you can really get a lot of exposure that way.

Tory Merritt:
Which is true of most earned media too, right? I think that's what we're talking about for the most part is how do you earn it versus buy it. Because at the end of the day, if you've earned it, it goes a lot further than just another trophy that you picked up at Walmart for yourself.

Guy Bauer:
And that, I'll segue, I'm going to change all my numbers of... I'll segue that into number three and number three is put some money behind it. Facebook is insanely good at AI and mining people's data and not keeping them private and all that stuff. Use that to your advantage until they get...

Tory Merritt:
Until they get shut down.

Guy Bauer:
Until they get shut down. But I mean, what's interesting is on Facebook, I used to make all these custom audiences. I don't do that anymore. I just let the AI do it for me. I use lookalike audiences. You can actually upload your email list and it'll find look alike audiences and stuff like that. I think that's LinkedIn. But Facebook is insanely amazing at knowing, kind of just using all of its AI tools of what people would find this content interesting based on the people that have already found this content interesting.

Guy Bauer:
So I stole this from Gary Vaynerchuk, but in his book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, what he does is you post organically on Facebook and if you see... Facebook will actually give you a little email. It'll say, "Hey, this post is performing better than 85% of your posts." That's usually my indicator. That's my trigger to sponsor a post. So if it's performing better than 85% of your typical posts, that means that people are finding this engaging.

Guy Bauer:
And so what you do is you just hit the boost button, boost it for 50 bucks and you'll see that you'll just get a lot more shares on that post when you boost. So don't be afraid to put money. Just because you put money behind something doesn't mean that it's somehow tainted in terms of it's not organic. The way I see it is when we make our videos, I call them slippery. Meaning, yeah, we've only really made one viral video and that's probably the Premium Beat video. I believe our videos are just slippery in terms of when you put money behind them, they kind of get shared easily and they'll kind of move around the ecosystem just in a slippery kind of easier way. Less viscosity.

Hope Morley:
And you brought up Facebook and something that within their algorithm, which is getting so complicated and it's hard for marketers to keep up with what exactly they are showing to people. But shares are a big metric that Facebook looks at for engagement. So we might think a lot about, did it get a lot of likes? Did it get a lot of comments? But shares are a really important metric too. And once that post gets more engagement, that's when Facebook on its own will boost it to more people and show it to more people even without having to put that money behind it.

Tory Merritt:
How much commitment does it take? Right? You hit a like, it's pretty easy. I haven't put a whole lot behind it and not putting my name so much behind it because not everyone's going to see it. If I'm going to share it, I'm validating it to everyone else. Like, "Hey, I think this is funny or smart or important." Demonstrates that you are going to take the extra effort, especially if they're going to write a caption to go with it as opposed to just sending it off as is.

Guy Bauer:
Yeah, and I mean the main thing is though is look for those organic cues to kind of prompt you to sponsor or... Just because a video is playing well on Facebook doesn't mean it'll play well on LinkedIn and vice versa. So I always like to kind of put my toe in the water and see how it's doing organically before I decide how much to boost it. What kind of budget and what kind of audience and all that stuff. So I always like to just see how it's doing organically first and then put money behind.

Tory Merritt:
So testing is key right? If you've got the funds to do it before you put it out in the world, that's great. If you don't, you shouldn't be afraid to go ahead and test. The way that everything's set up now it can be affordable to do AB testing or testing. In my experience, it's a lot of clients are nervous about spending money to test. Well what if it bombs? Well wouldn't you rather know it bombed on a small budget, then put your whole buy behind it and then it doesn't do well? So being here and going through our Umault experience, I think testing has been something that I'm not as afraid to do anymore because how else are you going to find out? It's a guess. It's a guess either way at some point, so you might as well test it out.

Guy Bauer:
Yeah, and a lot of videos that are credited with being viral. So there's one video in particular. I'm not trashing this video. I love it actually it's for Chatbooks that Harmon brothers did. I literally love this spot. It gets credited as a viral video, but I remember when I saw Chatbooks it was sponsored and so you know, Chatbooks put a lot of money behind sponsoring and like I said, the video is so slippery that then it kind of just took on a life of its own. But it did need a boost.

Hope Morley:
It needed a push.

Guy Bauer:
Right. And there's so much saturation of content out there that there really is no other way to expose your content to a larger audience enough to be shared then putting some money behind it.

Hope Morley:
Absolutely. All right, what's number four?

Guy Bauer:
All right, number four. All my numbers are messed up. Okay. This one is really good. LinkedIn rolled out a new feature on company pages where you can put three hashtags on your company page. So you can choose three hashtags that fit what your company does, right? Or the market that you're trying to talk to or yada yada. And you can peruse those hashtags and then post from your company on those three hashtags. Because usually LinkedIn, if you can't really post on someone else's content from your company page. It always defaults to your personal.

Guy Bauer:
But inside of these three hashtags that your company chooses, you may post as your company. So this is similar to search.twitter.com but it's choose the three hashtags because you can change your company's three hashtags at any moment. It's not like set in stone. So when you make this video, again let's use the powder coating example. Change your hashtags to three hashtags that someone in powder coating, like abrasives, powder coating itself, or whatever. Aircraft metal. whatever those three hashtags that relate to the video, you can put on your LinkedIn and then start going through just like search.twitter.com and join the conversation on each post.

Guy Bauer:
And this is what I do on a daily basis for our agency and especially when we do have a video to promote or kind of get shares is just join. Again, don't spam. You're not spamming every post you're trying to listen and kind of comment or like and just get in that Double Dutch conversation to where your video can naturally be shared. The other thing you can do is, you don't even have to say anything about your video. You can leave a comment, right? People will go to your profile, you pin your video to the top of your LinkedIn profile, and then that's the first thing they see. So that's another organic way to get the shares and views.

Hope Morley:
Same with Twitter. If you have something you're really trying to promote, pin it to the top of your feed so people see it.

Tory Merritt:
Instagram too. You can do your stories right at the top, highlights.

Guy Bauer:
Well you guys are so cool, you know all the platforms.

Tory Merritt:
So many platforms.

Hope Morley:
Let's talk about TikTok because we're hip. All right. What's number five?

Guy Bauer:
I actually...

Tory Merritt:
All I think of is Kesha now.

Guy Bauer:
Can we do a quick aside? I've only posted one thing to TikTok and it's the most viral I've ever gotten on a social...

Tory Merritt:
Social validation.

Guy Bauer:
I got so much. It's crazy. TikTok honestly is probably... Have you guys done TikTok?

Hope Morley:
No.

Tory Merritt:
I've never done it? I've watched you do it.

Guy Bauer:
I do think it's going to put everything else out.

Hope Morley:
But they're getting a lot of downloads but very few people use it for more than a month. They're not sticking with people.

Guy Bauer:
Really? I find it a delight.

Tory Merritt:
It's too random.

Guy Bauer:
It's a delight.

Tory Merritt:
Delight.

Guy Bauer:
No, it really is.

Tory Merritt:
If you need friends, just join TikTok.

Guy Bauer:
Do you remember early on in YouTube or Wikipedia, you would go into these holes?

Hope Morley:
I still get into Wikipedia holes.

Guy Bauer:
Wikipedia holes. But I used to go on YouTube holes. TikTok feels like that. It's like you go into these two hour holes and it's amazing. Anyway.

Hope Morley:
Anyway, tip number five.

Guy Bauer:
All right. This is super practical and it has worked many times for me. Again, almost like the other tip, every time I think of it I'm, "Why don't I do this more often?" This requires... This is super practical. This requires one full day of your time. So again, go with our powder coating example. So we have a video about powder coating, about how our powder coating is the best. All right, so this takes a full day split into two four hour segments. For the first four hours you're in research mode. You're trying to find every single blog on the planet that cares about powder coating and then the master category, which would probably be abrasives or painting or whatever, right?

Guy Bauer:
So every single blog, every single aggregator of content or curator of powder coating content. Every single influencer in the powder coating or painting sphere. And for four hours you are just researching and writing down all of the links or emails to submit content to these blogs, aggregators, influencers. For example, if it's an influencer, it's just their profile contact, whatever. And after four hours, you should probably have a list of, I don't know, 50 to 60 things. 50 to 60 sites, people, blogs, whatever. Right? Okay. So that's the first four hours.

Tory Merritt:
Do you get a lunch break between these?

Guy Bauer:
Yeah. Then you go to lunch...

Tory Merritt:
It's boot camp.

Guy Bauer:
You go to Taco Bell.

Tory Merritt:
Taco bell.

Hope Morley:
Specifically for this plan to work, it must be Taco Bell.

Guy Bauer:
Listen, we're the experts. You do Taco Bell, number two, Supreme with a Pepsi.

Tory Merritt:
You low acid people are just not going to be able to take this one.

Guy Bauer:
And a bean burrito on the side. And then they're like, "Is that it?" And you're like, "Umm, wait, do I got to think of other people?" And then it's a lie, because you're just ordering for yourself. Anyway. You go home and have lots of shame.

Hope Morley:
And your afternoon is hating yourself. No, what is your afternoon?

Guy Bauer:
Okay, so your afternoon is then four hours. And again, this is why you really can't shortcut this. This is one day of your life. Second four hours is writing customized letters to all 50, 60 of these people. And you may have a hundred. When I did it the last time, it was probably like 60 but what you got to do is write a custom letter to all 60 people and email, whatever, right? And it's got to have, if you've ever read the book How To Win Friends And Influence People, it's got to be benefit driven to them. Not like, "Hi, I'm trying to make this... I'm trying to get shares on my video." They don't care. So it's...

Hope Morley:
What's in it for them.

Guy Bauer:
What's in it for them, right? "Hey I really love your thing. Your audience may get a kick out of this." Boom. The thing why you want to be shared on these blogs and aggregators is they have a built in audience and if you've done your research right, their audience is all about the thing that you're about to give them. A video about powder coating. So usually you'll get about a 10% success rate. So if you send 60 emails out, you can expect to get six posts. But those six posts that may be to 30 to 40,000 people that are like hyper targeted to exactly what your video is talking about. So those are very high value shares. And that's why this is my number five because it's the best one.

Hope Morley:
And the biggest thing with this tip and all of them, it is all very time consuming. Like you said, this takes all day. You only get your one Taco Bell break and other than that you are at your computer doing your research. But doing this gives you credibility in the marketplace. So that's what shares really do. Like Tory briefly mentioned on Facebook, a like or something like that is a very low commitment from your audience. But getting a share, those people are putting a seal of approval on that content. So if you're getting these influencers on their blog, on their Instagram, what have you, you are getting instant credibility for your content so that even the views that you do get on that video are going to be more targeted and more willing to think well of your brand.

Guy Bauer:
Yeah. And engage with it. They may go to the website or do whatever. The other thing is, don't be afraid to, this is going to make some people upset, but don't be afraid to talk to your own industry too. I know a lot of people are like, you should always talk to your customer, not your actual industry. It's a little, who cares if it... But a lot of times if you can get a lot of shares within your own industry, your customers actually see that as almost like a leader.

Hope Morley:
A market leader.

Guy Bauer:
Correct. And that's exactly what happened with our Premium Beat spot. It got shared, shared, shared, and then low and behold, a customer happened to have a video hobby or whatever. This customer saw the article about our thing and then reached out and became a client. So it's like an oblique way of getting more customers. But don't be afraid to speak to your own industry too. They may find it interesting.

Tory Merritt:
Yeah, and we've been seeing that a lot in innovation too. We have a consulting client and just talking to them, it used to be, "Hey, just take as much of the space for new product launches and ecosystem launches as you can now." Instead, it's find your niche in the ecosystem and then partner up with people that you used to look at as indirect competition. Use each other to help bring the full ecosystem to life. So I think it's similar in that way, which is don't be afraid to talk to the people in your industry. You're not all direct competition. You actually can help each other out when maybe you're not a good fit and they are and vice versa.

Guy Bauer:
Yep, that's all I got.

Tory Merritt:
Guy's five tips.

Hope Morley:
All right, thanks for listening to this episode of So You Need A Video. For more information and for links to some of the videos and things we talked about in this episode today, you can visit our website at Umault.com. That's U-M-A-U-L-T .com and if you liked what you heard today, please subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Thanks Guy and Tory.

Tory Merritt:
Thanks Hope, Thanks Guy.

Guy Bauer:
My pleasure.