FROM LIVE JOURNALTO TWITTER: USING SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES TO GET YOUR VIDEO OUT THERE
Social networking is really the key ingredient to getting a regular audience for your videos. The whole phenomena of these sites has been around since before Livejournal, and has since gone through a gradual evolution... We'll start with MySpace.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MYSPACE
Yeah, MySpace pages are kind of annoying. They autoplay a really bad song for you as soon as you load the page up, they're loaded with flashy graphics and they're mostly just a bunchy of photos people took of themselves at a party. But! It's still worth looking into, because that's actually not what the site was designed for.
The site was actually created for the purpose of letting musicians promote themselves, with or without a talent agent. On that level, it's been an incredible success. Many musicians who might never have had a shot at getting signed before MySpace have gone on to have incredibly lucrative careers by selling their own CDs over the site, and in fact, most of today's record producers are constantly sifting through MySpace with a fine tooth comb to find the next big thing.
It just so happens that it was also a great way for people to meet others with similar interests. If you look at the fact that many on MySpace have thousands of "friends" listed, then it also becomes obvious that a side effect is that a lot of people simply collect friends almost as a form of points…
MAKING CONNECTIONS
The whole idea of "friends" on MySpace is a little weird. When you look and see that someone has over one thousand friends... well, nobody has more than one thousand real friends, but a friend on MySpace is just someone who regularly looks at your site to see what's new. For an artist, a musician, a video maker, this is great. This means that you're getting a bigger audience than most independent filmmakers get.
MySpace is still around, but it seems that their glory days have passed. Today, everyone has moved on to Facebook and Twitter, and what's more, YouTube has adopted the social networking of MySpace to allow video makers to skip that process.
You can now "friend" people on YouTube and similar sites, and there's actually something of a community on the site now. More than just a place to dump your videos and forget about them, the site's focused has shifted to connecting video makers to one another.
And here's the thing... if you want your videos to go viral, you really want to get involved in that social aspect.
The video channels with the most subscribers on YouTube usually have a lot of subscriptions and friends, as well. So the trick to getting a lot of YouTube viewers is to watch a lot of YouTube. Leave a lot of comments on popular videos, because people will often follow those comments back to your channel. Subscribe to any video channels you like, send a friend request to the ones who cover similar subject matter.
GET TO KNOW YOUR FELLOW VIDEO MAKER
If you ask any of the most popular YouTubers, they'll tell you that being an active member of the community is a bigger part of getting views than anything you actually put in your videos themselves (of course, a bad video won't get many views no matter what, but you get the idea).
Using Twitter and Facebook is another great way to get your stuff recognized. These are basically blogging sites have character limits, so you can't post more than 150 words on Twitter, for example. Back in the Livejournal days, somebody might have, say, twenty or thirty friends, since their posts were longer so, any more than thirty and you'd be spending all day catching up on the posts.
Now, since the posts on Facebook and Twitter are always pretty short, most people on those sites have hundreds of friends who they actually do make a point of keeping up with. On Twitter, it's actually quite easy to read a list of several hundred friends posts. While the character limit is set at 150 characters, most posts are actually shorter, usually being less than ten words in length, and it's actually quite easy to breeze right through, say, three hundred friend updates in an hour. That's fewer than three thousand words.
So the point is that you can easily get on these sites and start exploring. Friend every user you like, and then start posting your videos. If you friend, say, ten people a day for a week, that's seventy people. For two weeks, that's one hundred forty people. That may not seem like much, because what's a mere one hundred forty regular views? But... that brings us to our next chapter.