Everyone always wants to know how to get a video to “go viral”

While there’s no secret recipe or formula, there are some rules of thumb that can be applied to increase your chances of gaining traction in the world of social media.

One of the primary rules is that you need to balance SEO and production. The SEO side of things ensures that your video is searchable and visible to the masses, while the production side ensures the quality is on par with something that people are actually interested in engaging with and sharing.

Getting the SEO Right

There are a lot of different ways people can come across a video you produce, but without a basic SEO strategy in place, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever gain any traction. Think of it like a beautiful waterfall in the middle of a forest.

Sure, someone could stumble upon it if they were lost in the woods and just happened to find themself in the right place.

But it’s much more likely that lots of people will arrive if there’s a clear map with conspicuous signposts directing hikers to the oasis.

A video SEO strategy is like a map. It tells people how to find your video in a sea of millions of other pieces of fragmented content.

There are plenty of different ways to optimize a video for search, but one of the most important aspects is the title.

“Crafting a compelling video title is a balancing act—you have to make the title SEO friendly and make it clickable,” says Puranjay Singh of Single Grain. “Ideally, you should follow the same convention in your video titles as you would in your blog posts: to get clicks and shares, include keywords as well as power words.”

You also want to pay attention to the video description, tags, and metadata.

Nailing Video Production

It’s not enough for people to find your video. If they simply watch it and move on without any further action, you’re extracting very little value from each individual view.

Using the previous example, even the best map in the world doesn’t do much if hikers arrive at the waterfall and are underwhelmed.

Once people get there, you want them to be captivated, take pictures, share with friends, and invite them to come with you the next time you visit.

Moving back to the marketing side of things, the hope is that people will see your video and share their experience with friends.

This is where you have to think about production.

Today’s best videos are optimized for the mobile experience.

For starters, this means short videos perform best.

As social media expert Donna Moritz puts it, “Short videos suit our busy lives, brief attention spans and the need to consume content easily and quickly. Because fans are consuming content via their mobile devices while they’re on the go, the shorter the content is, the better.”

You’ll also notice that a lot of today’s most viral videos feature subtitles, which is also aimed at maximizing the experience.

Social media users often access video content when they’re in public places where sound isn’t appropriate. Therefore, the subtitles allow for engagement in any situation.

Reaping the Rewards

All too often, marketers make the mistake of only focusing on SEO – or only worrying about production. The truth is that these two seemingly independent aspects must be appropriately leveraged and balanced in order to achieve optimal virality on any social media platform.

If you want to reap the rewards, you have to put in the work.

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Video advertising creative is perhaps the most painstaking for advertisers to deal with during the planning and production stages. While there’s no magic formula to creating the “best” video ad, direct response-focused advertisers are inherently test-oriented, and they will eventually find creative that works well with their target audiences to achieve their larger objective.

One thing we can learn from looking at aggregate advertiser data is that the best-performing video ads for a given vertical generally fall within a narrow duration and typically share a few commonalities.

As a note, the findings outlined in this column reflect data analyzed as part of my work at Nanigans. Specifically, the sample consists of Facebook video advertising activity originating from 10 of the highest-spending gaming and e-commerce video advertisers. Ads studied were those run by the sampled advertisers at any point from September 1, 2016, through February 28, 2017.

Let’s first focus on the gaming vertical, where you find collectively the largest spenders on video advertising within the direct response ecosystem.

What’s the best video ad length?

Video ad length for these advertisers is most frequently 11 to 20 seconds long, with 62 percent of all studied gaming video ad creative within this 10-second range. An additional 10 percent of video creative for gaming advertisers comes in at 31 to 35 seconds long.

While the above graph outlines how gaming advertisers structure the length of the creative, marketers care most about conversion rates. In the case of gaming, this relates to installs. To quantify this metric by video length, aggregated click-to-install conversion rates were calculated for each length of video, and then weighted by total spend for that video length across the studied advertisers.

The result pointed to some interesting findings. Despite 16- to 20-second videos being the most popular length for gaming advertisers by more than 150 percent, conversion rates were only moderately higher than 21- to 25-second, or 31- to 35-second ads.

Of course, these insights are correlative, not causative. Just making a poor-performing 14-second gaming ad a 20-second ad isn’t likely to increase your conversion rate by itself. However, in the course of the analysis, there were a few similar characteristics of the best-performing video gaming ads.

• Focus creative on the game’s ‘greatest hits’ — Ads that simply showed game play in a continuous fashion, or as a kind of tutorial, weren’t as well received. Focusing on a series of exciting, colorful or dramatic sequences tended to be associated with increased conversion rates.
• Minimal in-ad CTAs — Ads relying on the CTAs present within the Facebook ad unit itself tended to perform better.
• In-market creative testing and segmentation — Better identify what creative resonates with different target user segments.

Unlike their gaming counterparts, the length of e-commerce video ads tends to be much more widely distributed and comparatively weights more toward longer lengths. The 16- to 20-second range is still popular, but only accounts for 20 percent of e-commerce video creative.

Meanwhile, 42 percent of ad creative in this group was between 21 and 35 seconds in length. This may be due to more complex value propositions in convincing someone to purchase or subscribe to a service, as compared to simply downloading a game.

For e-commerce advertisers, the 16- to 20-second length boasted the best conversion rate, but longer video ads weren’t far behind. Twenty-six- to 35-second lengths lagged behind the top conversion rate by moderate, but not significant, amounts in aggregate.

Video advertising best practices

With a wider variance in target markets and value propositions, the differences between ads were larger within e-commerce as compared to gaming. Regardless, there were a few qualitative aspects to the best-performing creative that were represented across a few advertisers in the sample.

• Unique visuals — Some of the best-performing creative for e-commerce advertisers had a unique look and feel. This included a static image with a video playing within or some dramatically sped-up product usage.
• Consider testing silent versions — A number of advertisers experimented with the same creative with and without sound, and the silent editions tended to perform better.
• Experiential rather than descriptive — Videos visualizing the experience of using the product were generally well-received from a conversion standpoint.

These data points should help shape the direction of your video creative, particularly as you look to test against different audience segments. Just as with any ad type, be sure to test a few variations on length and format, as the effectiveness is likely to differ across your various user segments.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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Nintendo gamers may be better at virtually milking cows, but they say dairy farmers beat them at the real thing, hands down.

Two Nintendo employees on Wednesday beat two farmers at Vermont’s Billings Farm Museum during a game of 1-2 Switch, where players perform various minigames, for the new Nintendo console Switch.

The Woodstock farm challenged Nintendo to the competition.

A day before the head-to-head battle, the Nintendo employees got a lesson in actual cow-milking. But on the day of challenge, they agreed they were no competition for the farmers.

Nintendo’s David Young said « Games are fun, but actually working on a farm is hard work. »

Liberal-leaning states are promising to push forward with aggressive targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and developing renewable energy sources just as President Trump moved to roll back much of his predecessor’s efforts to combat climate change.

In state capitols from Albany to Sacramento, Democrats lambasted the executive order Trump signed Tuesday that begins the process of rolling back the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule aimed at cleaning up coal-fired power plants.

“President Trump’s decision to ax the Clean Power Plan cedes U.S. global leadership and increases the risk that climate change will continue to damage our state. We can’t afford to slow our efforts, and we won’t,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) said Tuesday.

A coalition of 17 Democratic attorneys general and city attorneys from six cities said they would consider what legal actions could be taken to block Trump’s order.

“We’re very confident that the EPA cannot simply dismantle the CPP and leave nothing in its place,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) said in a conference call Tuesday afternoon. “We regret the fact that the president is trying to bow back history. But it’s not going to happen. The markets are moving. The states are moving.”

Inslee, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D), California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) and the Democratic mayors of Seattle; Portland, Ore.; San Francisco; Oakland, Calif.; and Los Angeles said in a joint statement that the new executive order “moves our nation in the wrong direction and puts American prosperity at risk.”

Separately, Jerry Brown and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) reaffirmed their states’ commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years to well below previous highs. Both states have set goals of lowering greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

In both statements, the governors said collective action is necessary to combat a global problem. New York is a member of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cooperation between Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states that established a cap-and-trade program. Washington, Oregon, California and British Columbia, in northwest Canada, have signed a similar agreement.                 

“It doesn’t make sense for Oregon to do it alone. It makes sense when we [combat climate change] on a regional basis,” Kate Brown said Saturday in Seattle, where she and Inslee met to plot strategy.

Last week, California’s Air Resources Board voted to implement strict emission limits on automobiles and to require automakers to get more zero-emission vehicles to market. That vote came after Trump ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reconsider greenhouse gas emission limits put in place by the Obama administration, limits in which California has a say under the 1970 Clean Air Act.

California must now seek a waiver from the EPA for its stricter limits. If that waiver is granted, as it was under the Obama administration, other states may adopt those same emissions limits.

Environmental groups say states taking action on climate change will enjoy the secondary benefit of cornering the market on renewable energy. New York has committed to developing wind turbines off Long Island. States like Washington and Oregon already get a huge percentage of their power from renewable hydro sources.

“Ultimately, states that lead like California, Washington and other, they are trying to capture as much of the clean energy market as possible,” said Bill Holland, state policy director at the League of Conservation Voters. “The governors of states like Washington and California are acting in the real world to create economic opportunity.”

But Republican-led states said the new executive order would reverse a rule that put an unfair onus on states and the energy industry.

“We’re heartened by the president’s latest action, which shows he’s serious about returning common sense and the rule of law to the EPA,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said in a statement. “And we look forward to the EPA returning to the cooperative approach with the states that the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act expressly require as it reconsiders the unlawful Clean Power Plan.”

The Democratic opposition to Trump’s rollback represents a new front in a burgeoning legal war between the administration and blue states, one reminiscent of the battles fought by Republican attorneys general against the Obama administration’s climate actions in recent years.

In the case of the Clean Power Plan, Republican states are still fighting the Obama-era rule. A coalition of 19 Republican-led states asked the EPA earlier this month to reconsider several rules, including the Clean Power Plan, under a collaborative framework they said was envisioned by both the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. 

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Music streaming service Spotify has acquired content recommendation startup MightyTV, a service that uses Tinder-style swiping to help guide users toward TV and film choices.

The terms of the deal are undisclosed but MightyTV has been shut down, as a result of the acquisition, and its team will join up with Spotify’s in New York City, Toronto and Stockholm.

Notably, MightyTV founder and CEO Brian Adams will join Spotify as VP of technology, focusing on advertising and marketing technology solutions. Adams founded Admeld, a publisher monetisation platform that was sold to Google in 2011. The sale saw Adams join Google to run its Doubleclick publisher platform before leaving in 2015 to found MightyTV.

MightyTV’s Android and iOS app presented users with video recommendations and let people swipe to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ these suggestions. Based on these ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’, MightyTV’s recommendations improved to match the user’s personal tastes.

“It’s an enormous opportunity for me and the team to help create native brand experiences that stay true to a product that millions love,” said Adams.

Jason Richman, VP of product at Spotify, added: “Brian and his team will help us continue to innovate on free monetisation and extend our leadership position in programmatic audio.”

While you may have been accustomed to watching videos horizontally thanks to the TV and movies, the next video marketing wave is vertical videos.

Vertical videos were historically shunned by creative agencies, marketers and video creators because they did not fit the aspect ratio of established moving image forms.

However, the rise of apps like Periscope and Snapchat that use the mobile-friendly “vertical” or portrait format have led to an explosion in vertical videos. And to help you easily create the vertical, animated marketing videos to fit this news trend, video platform Animaker is leading the way.

The company claims it is also first to create a vertical animated video format too.

The Animaker Vertical Video App

Animaker is a cloud-based DIY video animation software that comes in handy when you seek to create studio quality professional video.

In a blog post, the company says that they decided to upgrade their platform to allow the creation of vertical videos after 73 percent of of the 10,000 people asked in a targeted survey indicated a preference for vertical videos as the next big thing in video marketing.

So why the high demand for this type of video? “Living in the smartphone era, it is only a matter of time when vertical videos completely crush other formats,” Animaker’s content marketer Arvind Kesh stated. “There has been a tremendous spike in vertical videos online from a mere 5 percent to a whopping 30 percent in just five years!”

Kesh also went ahead to mention that vertical videos might be the right format for businesses that want to make marketing videos for Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and the like.

Animaker has three pricing plans: Personal, which is $9 per month billed annually; Startup, which is $19 per month billed annually; and Business, which is $39 per month billed annually.

Image: Animaker

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Within the last 2 years, Precious Ngwu and his staff have been refining this software and in the past one year, they have completely overhauled it and put brand new features consisted of the « matting and sticky gum marketing technology » to redefine the way of online business development.

People can find more detailed features of ReClick Software version 2.0 when click in here.

ReClick 2.0 is a powerful marketing platform that helps its users to place a single code and take control of their traffic and convert more visitors particularly the ones about to exit the page into leads and buyers.

Let take a look at what features ReClick 2.0 Software has to offer its customers:

ReClick has more beautiful   high converting templates: Any smart marketer knows that template is everything when it comes to converting sales and leads online. With ReClick 2.0, people will possess dozens of beautiful templates ready to be deployed at the push of a button.

ReClick comes preloaded with a sleek, straightforward and flexible editor: Allow people to customize these templates and create campaigns at lightening speed with so much flexibility. Users can create anything from scratch within minutes.

ReClick Soft is Extremely Intelligent: There are over 50 potential combinations of ReClick 2.0’s automation rules in which people can configure their ReClick campaigns. All of these are 100% performance based yet that can not be found under other overpriced tools.

Lifetime membership without monthly payment: ReClick is a perfect marketing tool that can be used regularly in the online business to get more results without having to pay for it monthly.

No Throttling – Unlimited Traffic: With ReClick, Precious and his team only demand their users to pay one single fee and get access for life comes along with unlimited traffic.

Collaboration Technology is the unique feature that can only be found in ReClick: For any campaign or project, collaboration and teamwork are the primary key to success. However, the technology powering is usually very complicated, difficult and pricey to build. That is why only mega platforms like Google Docs, Trello, Dropbox, etc., have it. Fortunately, collaboration tech is also present in ReClick version 2.

Moreover, so many other bells and whistles such as Split testing, location-aware technology, deep avowing analytics, landers, reclinks, CTA hooks, customer-driven funnels, etc.

Here is how ReClick can help its users:

• On People’s Blogs and Websites: just copy a simple script code from ReClick campaign, paste it there and watch as it grows the online presence every day.

• On People’s Sales Pages: Place the code and the software does the whole work.

• On People’s Lead Capture  Landing Pages: use ReClick to stop visitors about to leave and recapture, even if people could only convert just 30% of those pre-sold visitors. Afterward, people will easily skyrocket their opt-in rate to 40 and 50% effortlessly.

• On people’s Shopify eCom Stores: integrate ReClick 2.0 in the stores to literally force visitors to add products to cart and make that purchase – Precious Ngwu and his team have lots of customizable eCommerce metrics.

• Video Marketers: Any place people market with videos, they can configure ReClick to show up at a certain point in the video, maybe just right at that second when the pitch has peaked and then close the sale because ReClick will handle the rest.

• To Maximize ROI on Paid Traffic (FB ads, Google Adwords, etc.)

• Any Place people Want to Capture Leads Buyers before the Visitors Leave the Site 

People can find more specific information about this product in ReClick 2.0 Review and Demo.

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