At Recruiting.com, we produce a lot of employment videos for our clients. As part of that process, we also do a few things to help our clients get exposure for those videos. One of the most important ways we do that is by making it easy for interested people to find those videos. How is that accomplished? Well, it basically boils down to good old fashioned search engine optimization.
Like most content on the web today, videos have quite a few ways of getting around. As with text and images, videos can easily be shared through the typical social channels (Facebook, Twitter, email, blogs, etc). However, videos have access to some additional channels that other content does not. If you have produced an employment video or some other piece of video content, you can take advantage of those channels to expand your potential audience.
Probably the most obvious video distribution channel is YouTube. With hundreds of millions of viewers, YouTube provides access to a vast audience. Of course, while the audience is vast, the amount of competing content is equally enormous. The key to being found among all the other videos is to think about how people find videos on YouTube. Since most of us aren’t making viral music videos, the most important methods are YouTube search and YouTube-related video suggestions.
To appear in YouTube’s search results and show up in the related video suggestions alongside other videos, YouTube needs to know what your video is about. You can help YouTube figure that out by:
For example: “Construction Jobs - How We Build Houses at MyCompany” as opposed to “Work at MyCompany.” Include relevant keywords and try to keep it interesting so that when people find it, they will want to watch it.
What is this video all about? What’s the background? Where does it take place? Who is in it? What are they doing? When was it shot? Also, don’t forget to add your career site URL to the description.
Tags are one or two word topical identifiers that help people (and YouTube) know what your video is about (i.e. jobs, employment, construction, building, Phoenix). You don’t need to go crazy, but YouTube provides plenty of space for tags.
An added bonus of providing descriptive information about your video on YouTube is that it will help your video appear in Google’s search results, another key traffic channel. Google mixes videos into their regular search results, and provides a dedicated video search option. That means that your video can become yet another way people find your company. In some cases, Google adds thumbnails to pages that have embedded videos, an addition that typically increases click through rates for that result.
In addition to the potential search benefits, sharing your video on a public site like YouTube or smaller players such as DailyMotion, Vimeo, or Metacafe also makes it easier for people to share your video or even embed it on their own site. This only magnifies the potential impact of your video even further. All in all, if you can produce a quality video, the upside to sharing it online is potentially very high (and the downside is virtually non-existent).
