Using video to promote your business once meant hiring a local production company, giving them a few days edit and finally, produce some media for your website or event. These days, with Social Media Marketing taking off, there are many new ways to use video.
UGC, or User-Generated Content is a low-cost way to create video straight from your phone that can be a powerful marketing tool.
The problem is, although many people record video of company events, product demos, and reviews on their phones, too often, it stays there. It’s a snap to get out your phone and press record, but not so easy to get video on your website, blog or YouTube.
Even phones with built-in YouTube Apps require a ridiculously complex process prior to uploading. Maybe you’ve even tried to send video via text or email. I’m guessing you had some difficulty. The video is either too big, too long or the wrong format for the recipient’s phone.
If you think about it, up till now, the most popular method of sharing mobile video is by passing it around.
There are a few recently released smartphone apps that aim to make the process much easier and more effective. Smart business people are using them for things like showing real estate or recording meetings.
Socialcam
Socialcam – is a free App for the iPhone and Android by Justin.tv. It really makes uploading video to social media sites a breeze. In fact you don’t even have to worry about uploading, it’s done in the background and video can be of any length.
After recording, you have the option to post to Facebook, Twitter, Posterous, Tumblr, Text Message, or email. The Posterous option is nice because Posterous itself has an auto-post feature to even more social media sites.
Video will play on any device that supports HTML5 or Flash, just be aware that this will exclude some devices. Socialcam is also has social media capabilities, so you can tag, comment and rate video.
Qik Video Connect
Qik Video Connect -Owned by Skype, this app works not only on Apple and Android, but on a wide variety of other phones. The feature that really sets Qik apart, is the ability to broadcast live events. This is great if your business has contests, entertainment or sponsors a local sports team. But it also does video on demand and even has built-in editing.
Qik enables easy uploading to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Other interesting features are VideoMail and the ability to do VideoChat between iOS and Android devices.
Thwapr
Thwapr – is positioning itself as a replacement for MMS. Traditional MMS is the default way to send multimedia on phones, but has a serious shortcoming, a 300K size limit. This is OK if you are sending a very, very short clip, but really doesn’t cut it these days.
The Thwapr iPhone App can send your full length video to over 300 different models of handsets. It optimizes the video size, format and quality for each device. Mobile to Mobile video sharing, geo-tagging, and easy uploads to Facebook and Twitter are included.
Summary
Using one of these apps can help get video off of your phone and put it online, where people can see it.
One last word of advice, give your video a quick edit before you upload. Just use the best parts, you don’t want to be boring. Qik and Thwapr have editing capabilities, with Socialcam you can use Apple’s iMovie or Android VidTrim.
If you’ve used any of these Apps, please leave a note below about your experience.