Nobody questions the necessity to engage with their potential audience. It's not enough to fire out tweets at regular intervals and then ignore any responses. Nothing will get you unfollowed quicker than ignoring your followers by using one-way tactics. Building up relationships through conversations is so important, as is communicating your message. Video is one way which, if done well, will captivate your audience and get them interacting with all your other social media formats as well. YouTube has positioned itself at the interface between video and social media, with some good tools which allow users to build their own YouTube 'channels' containing their own original work as well as favourite and recommended material, all in a format which can be exported to a blog, as well as being used to drive traffic to your website. Tweeting links to video will engage your followers, and clever social bookmarking (using Delicious, Digg and Reddit) of your stuff all help your site with search engine rankings.

There are five things you need to remember when using video.

1. Keep your video short and sweet. Five minutes is about the optimum length. Any longer and you will turn off your audience and your message will be lost as viewers head for the kettle !

2. Keep your video simple. Nothing turns off the audience than unintelligible gobbledegook, so keep the technical stuff for your specialist on-line library.

3. Keep your video fun. People want to be entertained, and will watch your material, and more importantly, come back to your site if they find it amusing. So if it fits your message, make it funny. You might even find yourself achieving cult status, or even going viral !

4. Keep your video relevant. The whole point of video is to promote your message, so aim for clarity and don't include irrelevant waffle. Promote your message, and avoid using video that has nothing to do with your core interest area.

5. Keep your video original. If its been passed around the interweb then it does nothing for your message unless you are in at the start. Just put out video which is as close to your brand as possible. Using funny stuff just so that you are appearing to use video is a bad move, and folks will probably have seen kit already anyway!


Video can be a meaningful addition to your social media strategy, but if done wrong, is time wasted. It should be a valuable tool for reinforcing your message, building an audience and engaging with them. After all, most people enjoy discussing video and film, so blog your video and start the discussion.
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