Video is a medium which is becoming increasingly popular across all industries when it comes to reaching out to new and potential international markets.
Whether you create a marketing video advertising your services, a product demonstration, or even a promotional, feel-good video featuring your employees having fun and not taking themselves too seriously; (The “Harlem Shake” phenomenon springs to mind!) videos are certainly a fantastic way to engage with your target audience.
But once you have your videos, how do you go about increasing the amount of shares in order to start racking up all those views? Here we have five handy hints that are guaranteed to improve the visibility of your video content on an international scale (and a video to demonstrate!).
Multilingual video subtitling
The first step to increasing international views of your videos is to have the content subtitled. After all, taking the effort to make your video content available in a variety of different languages is a simple but effective way to engage directly with your audience in their native languages and will help to build trust and relationships with users around the world.
If you have a collection of pre-existing video material in your own language then they can be recycled for your new markets with a little bit of TLC, saving you time and money by not having to go and re-record material directly into the language of your target audience. Audiences overseas are more likely to share video content if it is available in their mother tongue.
Multilingual video subtitles can also be presented in a variety of different ways and any graphics, animations or embedded text can be translated quite easily.
SEO-friendly video subtitles
We all know that when anyone wants to look something up the first thing they do is turn to a search engine for answers. Eye-tracking studies have shown that users tend to be drawn to video thumbnails when they appear in search engine results; rather those considered more “traditional” results. In order to increase the number of times your video is shared it is important that it ranks highly in the relevant search engine results.
In order to increase your international visibility in online searches it is essential that you incorporate keywords into your video subtitles. Keyword research will allow you to choose suitable keywords with high search volumes and build these into the translation of your video transcript. The great thing about web-based videos is that you can simply upload a subtitling document to your chosen video hosting platform, which will then be crawled and indexed by search engines.
Another useful tip is to try and include the word “video” in your title tag and description. More and more users add the word “video” into their search, and this might just give you an edge over your competitors in online searches.
A final SEO tip is to think about using the schema.org markup for your videos, to give them an even greater chance of being indexed in the search results.
Video hosting website selection
We have all heard of YouTube, but what about RuTube, Youku, or Nico Nico? These are video hosting websites specifically aimed at users in Russia, China, and Japan respectively. Dailymotion is a video sharing site available in 18 languages, and has 112 million unique monthly visits. If you want to expand into international markets, particularly Asia, it is definitely worth thinking about the various other platforms available. The right selection can definitely help improve your visibility, and in turn the overall number of shares and views your video will get.
View our video on Rutube, Youku, NicoNico and Dailymotion.
Social media sharing
Sharing videos via social media sites is becoming more popular with consumers who want to share information about a product they have seen, or footage which they have found interesting, with people in their network or community.
Having the option to share your multilingual videos, from your own website or from video sharing sites, is a brilliant way to increase the amount of views your videos will get. It is also beneficial if you already have accounts set up with the various social media sites used by your target audience. You can then share your subtitled videos from your own profile and start spreading the word. Again, it is worth researching your social media options, as many countries do not just use Facebook and Twitter.
Additional promotion
Creating additional content around your videos can help to increase their reach and attract new audiences.
Blogs are read by millions of people every day on a global scale, so writing a post to support your latest video is a fantastic way to reach out to people who may not stumble across your video via YouTube or other video hosting platforms. Also, you can easily embed your video within your blog post; just remember to enable the sharing capabilities in order to reach a wider audience!
If you want to be seen as being super on-trend then why not create a cool infographic to support your multilingual video content. Again this is another way of reaching out to your target market without solely relying on the power of your video. Embedding the video into the infographic and enabling sharing on social media sites is bound to increase interest and shares.
Should you have the ability for visitors to your website to sign up to an online mailing list then why not embed your video in an interactive newsletter or email? It is not only more personal than a simple “Thanks for signing up”; it is a really interesting way to involve members of your new target market from the get go. Guaranteed to get them talking, and in turn sharing.
When it comes to branching out into new and emerging markets you can really make the most of your video content by creating multilingual videos using subtitles. With so many ways in which to share and post interesting, engaging content out there it will enable your brand and products to gain increased visibility, popularity and notoriety on a global scale.
Emily MacKenzie
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Hi Emily. Excellent article on video sharing. These are some really good tips for expanding our audience to overseas markets. Thanks!