You’ve taken that important step in creating a video for your website – whether a video introduction to your business, promoting a product or service, or simply a commercial to spread on social media. There are several factors you need to think about producing videos for your website.
Production Value
Production Value is your planning process for the content of the video and contains your production strategy, the content of the story, the quality of the production and the location – because where the video will be set is important and will differ depending on what you are producing and why. You’ll need to think about the type of cameras depending on the setting and conditions, about the audio, effects and editing. You want a story that is memorable and engaging, and a video that makes people want to share.
Encoding and Web Optimization
Videos represent around 1.3% of web content as the majority of viewed material. Your video is going to have a lot of competition so it’s important that you encode and optimize effectively. Viewers have very little tolerance for lag, but they also have little tolerance for poor quality video in a professional production; so, think carefully about the size of your video against the quality. If you want higher quality, reduce its frame rate or size. Encoding is the process of compression and this affects your quality. If you are using a service like YouTube or Vimeo, then they effectively manage the size, frame rate and date rate for you.
Distribution
Naturally, you want to cast your net as wide as possible to encourage people to engage with it. It should certainly go on your website but where else? YouTube is the most popular and largest video sharing website and is owned by the largest search engine (Google) but you will be up against a lot of competition. Certainly use it, but don’t limit your distribution to YouTube. Consider using Vimeo –its web share is smaller but many businesses favor it because of its faster load times and high quality video.
Embed or not to embed
It may be one of the issues you hadn’t considered – whether to embed videos (that are hosted on an outside server) or to self-host your videos on your own server. There are a number of advantages on both sides. For embedding, the advantage is that you do not take up a lot of space on your website – keeping the costs of web storage and data usage down. Yet if you choose to embed, there is the potential for significant lag on your website which will not appear very professional to your visitors. Trade this off against the ease of sharing from YouTube or Vimeo and it may be a price worth paying.
Viewing Analytics
Google has an impressive analytics system and is a reason why it is essential that you consider putting your video on YouTube. This is vital in gauging the popularity of your video. The easy to use information shows you how much traffic it gets, how much of the video people are watching (if they are clicking away after less than 15 seconds, you may wish to figure out why), and its popularity. For embedded videos, there is an option to track views so make Google Analytics an important part of your marketing.
