Using YouTube to Promote other Social Media

The Orange Stack
Jul 30, 2018
3 min read

Start with Why

When agents think of a social media strategy they often think of the usual platforms; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. They will often rush to secure these accounts in the interest of branding. However, what usually happens after this is they get overwhelmed by the amount of time and effort needed to maintain all these accounts. Keeping in mind each is optimized for different types of content; they find themselves spending more time posting to social media than prospecting for leads. Before undertaking such a broad social media strategy, ask yourself why you need all these accounts. If you cannot spend time creating high-quality images to post to Instagram, is it practical to promote the channel? Ideally, you need to pick two channels that you feel you can manage and then focus on building them out. Avoid mentioning or promoting the others if you know you will not have the time to keep them active.

Build Your Home Base

While you may have an engaged and growing community on YouTube and other social media channels, you need to focus most of your effort on building your home base, which is your website. As you create, publish and promote your videos on YouTube, you need to remember that your primary focus should always be on driving traffic to your website. While it is okay to send traffic to Twitter and Facebook, the one place you will own the traffic you receive is your website. YouTube algorithms could change, or their policies could change, and this could affect your YouTube viewership. Such changes will not affect your website or email list.

Offer Exclusive Content

Now that you know why you want to use the social profiles you are using and how important it is to focus on building your home base let’s now look at what it is that will drive traffic from YouTube to your other social media profiles. Exclusive content is anything that isn’t available on your other profiles. For example, you could offer a free eBook that is only available on your Facebook page. Or you could post an invitation to a webinar to Twitter that isn’t available on your other profiles. By offering exclusive content, you give your viewers the incentive to seek out your other social media profiles. But, there’s a second part to this formula, which is combining unique content with calls to action.

Use Calls to Action

Calls to action provide your viewers with the next steps they can take after watching your video. Most agents miss this opportunity by using either no calls to actions or using weak ones. An example of a weak call to action is asking people to comment on the video. While this is great, it does nothing to grow your brand or even generate leads. Instead, what you need to focus on is providing actionable CTAs that help grow your audiences on your other channels. For example, when offering exclusive content, have a call to action either during the video or in the end credits that explicitly instructs your viewers to visit your other social media profiles. One thing to keep in mind is that you must have something exclusive to offer them. Otherwise just telling them to connect on other platforms is a weak CTA.

Have A Strategy for Each Profile

Finally, you need to have a strategy for each of the social profiles you have. What this means is that when someone visits your Twitter profile, they will not find screenshots from your YouTube video. Similarly, someone visiting your Facebook profile will not find a link back to your YouTube video. Have strategies optimized for each channel to help people interact natively with each profile. For instance, they could visit your YouTube channel for videos longer than 3 minutes but know they can find short videos on Facebook or Twitter. As you send traffic to your other profiles, make it a point to offer your visitors an experience tailored for each channel.