5 Takeaways From VidCon 2018
I had the opportunity to venture up to Anaheim this weekend, right into the center of the full cast of characters that make up the who's who of internet stardom. While their experiences in social video may not be directly applicable to major sports/brand channels, there are still nuggets of information that can be applied to brand channels. Here are five of my take aways from the conference...
Content is king, and delivery/distribution is queen. Obviously, your content has to be good or else no one will give you their attention. Distributing that content effectively is just as important. Are you giving videos interesting titles and engaging thumbnails? Are you editing videos so that they are optimized for each platform? Are you cross-promoting your videos across your different channels?
Poorly performing Youtube videos can negatively affect the viewership of the videos that follow. Momentum is everything, just as a viral highly viewed video can give your channel momentum and build your audience, one poorly performing can significantly stall that channel growth and will hurt the videos that follow. As it relates to a sports youtube channel(or probably a lot of brands for that matter), not every postgame interview/press conference/informational piece of content is going to perform well, so it puts extra importance on your programmatic content to provide a strong base for your viewership.
Authenticity is key. Your fans can tell when content is forced and isn't an accurate reflection of your brand's personality, which will reflect in your content viewership. As a brand, the easiest way to inject some of that authenticity into your content is definitely through your regular programmatic content. We were able to start seeing this point through the weekly "Anteater Vlog" that we were producing this spring.
You don't necessarily want to post right at the peak fan engagement time. It's an easy thing to think that posting right at the peak time of your follower's activity will lead to the most engagement. However, posting about an hour before that activity peak can give you more of an opportunity to have higher engagement. This is most relevant for any programmatic content where you have the opportunity to plan ahead of time when to post.
It's survival of the fittest when it comes to the evolution of social video platforms. Some platforms will die off, and some will evolve and grow. Facebook Watch could continue to turn Facebook into a long-form video-centric platform for programmatic content. Instagram TV is extremely new and is the first significant step into long-form vertical video. The more quickly you can recognize these changes and adapt, the better off your channels will be. Sometimes the best approach may be to jump right in!