Three billion, 800 million, 60. The number of hours of video watched each month, the number of monthly unique visitors and the number of hours of video uploaded every minute.

There’s no denying the consumer demand for quality shareable video content. And while it can be tempting to think of copy as the core content marketing tool for your business, the 100 million social actions taken on YouTube every week, pay homage to the brand awareness and conversion capabilities of quality video content.

Before getting bogged down in enormities, we’ve pulled together a selection of altogether more bite size tips to help you create successful YouTube videos.

1. What’s in a name?

In a nutshell, everything. It’s your video’s first call-to-arms and it needs to captivate and inspire the viewer. Give the video a catchy headline that summarises the video’s content and make it short and snappy. Long headlines lose interest. And don’t forget to pepper with optimised keywords to help the search algorithm match your video to relevant search queries. This is equally true of the video’s description – try to incorporate relevant keywords into the first couple of sentences and make sure the description gives a concise, relevant explanation of what viewers can expect to see.

2. Nail that thumb

YouTube selects the exact mid-point frame of a video and uses this as the thumbnail. This is the first thing a viewer sees before clicking through to the video and it’s also the image that features in Google search results, so it needs be visually engaging. As reported by Digital Telepathy, Yobongo saw a 70.9% increase in conversions when they changed their video thumbnail. YouTube will always give a small selection to choose from and a simple play with video editing software will enable you to modify the mid-point frame to make it more powerful.

3. Content is king

Does the video engage, inspire, inform, entertain? If it falls flat on all four fronts, then no amount of post-production will plaster over this. Keep it short, shoot in HD quality and always view it through the eyes of the consumer.

4.  No comment

While it can be tempting to disable YouTube comments for fear of video vandalism, these are a valuable means of gauging consumer sentiment and understanding what works well and what doesn’t. Just remember to set email alerts up so that offensive comments can be quickly spotted and removed.

5.  Spread the word

Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, VEVO, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, Digg, Delicious. There’s no end to the social networks ready and waiting for your video content to be shared across. And there’s no end of social networkers ready and waiting for video content to share.

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With the high profile acquisition of Instagram by Facebook for $1bn there is a lot of speculation about Facebook’s plans for the photo editing/sharing mobile app. CNET and the Guardian’s coverage of the takeover are the most comprehensive

CNET – Why Instagram just made the lives of Facebook’s IPO bankers a lot easier

Guardian – Facebook Instagram takeover

It also begs the question, how can brands utilise the service to drum up acquisition and engagement of fans. Currently the vast majority of the most popular Instagrammers are celebrities. There are a mere 7 brands in the top 100 most followed Instagram users and this goes someway to indicating Instagram’s main quandary, how do brands make the most out of Instagram?

1. instagram – 1,119,118
2. mtv – 444,581
3. starbucks – 415,555
4. burberry – 270,532
5. eonline -  263,544
6. victoriassecret – 230,527
7. billboard – 150,200

Current functionality presents more opportunities for consumer engagement than it does for acquisition.

Engagement

Competitions are an ideal way to emphasise the UGC element of Instagram. Brands can ask their communities to challenge themselves creatively, submit an image under a competition hashtag and then reward the best submissions.  There’s the potential to run competitions directly in Statigram, using tags to find the most stunning and creative shots.

Why not try using fan images for branded profiles, there are a number of apps out there that allow brands to aggregate Instagram images by topic, what better way to thank and recognise your fan community than by creating a mosaic of their content as your cover photo on Facebook or Twitter profile background? Instarium is a great way to see the potential of groups of Instagram images.

For fashion retailers the Instagram seems tailor made for showing off products in store in an appealing and simple way to core consumers. The Levis Brazil Instagram takes every opportunity to show off the latest styles…

E-commerce

Finally, should the branded imagery you create on Instagram prove popular enough, you might turn to Instacanvas to monetize that opportunity.  The e-commerce site turns your Instagram images into canvases that the public can buy. We all love a new revenue stream where appropriate.

Search and account management

Should you want to find particular images of your products or services that consumer may have Instagrammed you can’t go far wrong with Heroku.

Finally, what is the best way for brands to manage a large Instagram community and a multitude of images? One of the best Instagram desk platforms out there at the moment is Statigram.

Statigram (Photo credit: Felipe Vergara)

Even through this is a billion dollar company, it’s still very much in its infancy, after all it was only founded in 2010!  Facebook is bound to have big plans for it, especially around the integration of Instagram into the Facebook platform, as yet this is woefully under utilised.  Instagram itself isn’t making the most of integrating its functionality with that of Facebook – just take a look at its Facebook page. We’ll be sure to update you with the latest opportunities as they present themselves.

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Many brands would love millions of followers of their social media profiles, customers just waiting for that next brand message or purchase motivator. However, it’s not a one way street. Social gives customers  a direct and very visible route to a brand. Some might say that the more followers you have, the more often you will have to respond to consumer queries (meaning increased resourcing) or, even worse, negative sentiment.

Those clever bods at Conversocial have recently compiled a new study: Top US Clothing Retailers on their Customer Service Response Times on Twitter (based on their revenue listing in 2010) there’s a great summary on The Next Web, however what we think is most compelling is the insight that customer queries/complaints comes from consumers on the go. The trend of  customers in store tweeting from their mobiles is growing and emphasises the importance of swift and concise responses. After all when potential customer are that close to a purchase, can you afford to miss the opportunity?

Conversocial analysis of clothing retailer response times

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