10 Effective Strategies for Promoting Your Video Content on Social Media

Build Marketing Into Your Video Content

People get the wrong idea from MrBeast. Because he has practically built the giveaway content category and crowned himself its king, people think that having money and giving it away is the best way to get views.

So you might assume that to be as successful as MrBeast, you must also give away money. What's next? Thinking that to be as notorious as Andrew Tate, you have to shave your head?

Andrew Tate, MrBeast, and KSI all have one core reason for their success: their videos market themselves.

MrBeast didn't start off with money yet climbed the view ladder until he could afford to give away money for content. Even today, he comes up with interesting ideas for giving away money because he understands that nothing markets content better than its substance.

Create Context-Specific Teasers

No matter how unique your content is, if no one knows about it, no one will watch it. Or that was the idea until TikTok revolutionized content consumption by removing the click barrier.

People don't have to read your video title or view its thumbnail to consider playing it. They get videos served to them as they scroll down.

So, your content gets sampled for at least 2 seconds if it is in vertical format and shorter than a minute. If it is interesting enough and retains viewers long enough, it can go viral.

You can create specific teasers for this consumption context. Anything that can grab attention in the first two seconds, reward the audience for watching, and make them curious enough to check out your long-form content, will generate the kind of traffic that builds empires.

But that’s easier said than done. Making your TikToks function as TikToks and as promo for long-form content simultaneously is pretty challenging. That’s good news, though, as it sets apart mediocre content marketers from those who do their research.

Make Your Content Easier To Digest

You might find it depressing that a compilation of famous Youtubers' farts has over 90,000 views, while no one seems to care about your well-researched and thoughtful video. But there's no use crying over youtuber farts. The fact is, people do not care about almost anything that they're not familiar with.

Your greatest challenge as a content creator is to stop being a stranger to your prospective viewers. Youtuber Coffeezilla blew up talking about what he calls “fake gurus”. These were famous yet polarizing people that most people on Youtube knew about.

One of MrBeast's earlier viral videos was him saying "Logan Paul" 100,000 times. These are all instances of breaking the familiarity barrier by using what's already familiar. And that was five years ago. If people didn't care about new creators, then what are the odds of them caring now? In the hyper-digital age, where there are many more content creators. Millions more.

Fortunately, that just means that you have a million more opportunities to leverage other names, brands, and situations, to build familiarity.

• Content about people - With an average of one YouTuber apology a month, you have plenty to talk about if you choose to comment on people.

• Content about content - Commentary content is pretty easy to accept because when people don’t know you but know the content you’re talking about, they can get on board.

• Content about news - News commentary can have pretty significant content gaps, so you can provide for an underserved market.

Aside from shifting your content topics to something that has more social relevance and sharability, you have to make your social media posts easy to digest as well. Mention the relevant yet familiar topics and tropes in your post captions. Use the right hashtags. And make bite-sized and accessible content samples.

Engage In Positive Discussions In The Comments Section

"Fake it till you make it" used to work in a world where there the Polish and the sheen were venerated. We live in a post-polish world where authenticity matters far more. Sure, some personalities get so big they cannot afford to be unfiltered. Drake, for instance, cannot really be honest without alienating a part of his fanbase because his fan base is too large.

So should you act as precious and filtered as Drake? No. Because if people wanted to look at an overmanaged personality being mass-consumption-friendly, they’d watch Drake. The audience for that kind of content is already taken by people who are big enough to have no choice but to be PR-filtered.

So now, the dictum is "Be authentic until you have to fake it." A day will come when you can't afford to engage with every comment. But until that day, you should respond to the comments you can respond to. Be as honest as you can be, and do not try to pretend to be a celebrity. People who want to hear from celebrities already follow celebrities. Those who follow you want to hear from you. In your video and in the comments.

Respond To Every Share That You Can Track

Pavlovian conditioning refers to Pavlov's finding that a dog can salivate on the ding of a bell if you keep serving him food every time the bell dings. Social media apps are conditioning us to engage with posts. If you share a video with your friends and get a laugh emoji in response, you feel good. It wasn't your joke, but at least on a biochemical level, you got the same reward as someone coming up with the joke.

Can we fix this? Why would we want to? Social media users are primed to share good content with people who would respond to it. In some cases, they might share your video in their story or in their public posts. You should reward them by liking those posts. Respond to every trackable share without hesitation.

Capitalize On Easy-To-Rank Trends

Social media trends change quicker than the outfits in an H and M tryout room. But that’s an incredible opportunity for you to hop on a different trend every day. Make posts that are relevant to the trend but also plug your content. It is crucial to do this tactfully, though.

You must balance familiarity of the trend's tropes with the uniqueness that drives profile visits. If your long-form content doesn't naturally fit the context of the trend, then don't shoehorn it. Indulge in the trend, and get profile traffic. Some of it will translate to long-form video views.

Decentralize Your Distribution

If there's one thing Andrew Tate has to teach us aside from how to lose your Youtube income overnight, it is that decentralized content distribution works. He used affiliate marketing tactics to get cheap exposure. By positioning his content as the product and incentivizing people to share TikToks, reels, and shorts of him, he managed to create a social media phenomenon.

That’s why, even after his official Youtube channel was removed, he continues to dominate the trends and viewership on the platform. Decentralizing distribution doesn’t always mean paying people to post your content. Sometimes it just means owning multiple channels. A great way to market your video on social media is to pepper the social media landscape with bits and pieces from it.

Promote (Cautiously) On Reddit

You should not use this tip unless you’re familiar with Reddit. The platform can be simultaneously the best and the worst place to promote a video. It is a spam-conscious platform that downvotes and dislikes infiltrators who hop onto its forums for personal gain.

It is a generosity-oriented platform, so the best way to promote your content on Reddit is to have your channel link to your profile and add value to the discussions on relevant subreddits. Never plug your video into a discussion. Simply enough value that people decide to visit your Reddit profile.

Another thing worth remembering is that Reddit is quite fun. You might end up on forums that interest you instead of ones where your prospective audience is. It helps to remember that while you're being generous and avoiding spam, you're not on Reddit to indulge yourself.

Pin The Link Of Your Latest Video In The Comments Section Of Your Most Viral Videos

If you have three videos and the one with the highest viewership has three views, then that's your most viral video. Always pin your latest video in the comments section of your most viewed video. Because social media algorithms have shifted to a discovery model, your most viewed video has the highest chance of getting more eyeballs.

The top comment funnel can help siphon some of the algorithm-pushed viewers to the content that the algorithm isn't pushing as hard. But don't just drop a link to your video. Write something interesting that drives clicks. Curiosity clicks the cat or whatever. Treat the top comment real estate with the respect it deserves and pen a line that inspires clicks.

Position The Video As The Solution With Appropriate Captions

Text that drives clicks isn’t limited to top comments. Every time you make a post sharing the link to one of your videos, you have to pull out your marketing gloves. Your post captions should make potential viewers want to watch your video, and the best way to do that is with positioning.

Never position the click as a favor to you. Many people ask their friends and family to watch their content as a show of support. But it is much better to approach prospective viewers with the idea they would be better off after watching the video. Of course, the tough part about that is following through on that promise.

It is easy yet not very effective to beg for views without standing by a concrete user benefit. Incredibly hard but also incredibly effective is the path of committing to benefit the viewer and sharing said benefit in every post and in every reshare.

Advanced Strategies For Making Share-Worthy Content

If every person who watched your video recommended it to at least two other people, it would take twenty levels of exchange before a million people have watched your video.

That's the definition of "viral" because the virus usually transfers to more than one person from each person who gets affected. To make your content viral in a social sense (and not the algorithmic sense), it has to be worth writing about. And what's worth writing about is often worth talking about.

In this section, we will take a closer look at what makes content far more share-worthy than the average useful video. So, let's get started.

Stand For An Ideal

People become advocates of ideas long before they become advocates of people. Today, no one supports Karl Marx, but millions of people support communism. Almost half the people who support capitalism do not even know who Adam Smith is. Humans have passionately supported ideas for thousands of years.

When you become synonymous with an idea, people who support the idea can digest you more easily. There's an ego barrier that prevents us from listening to new voices. When we know that someone represents an idea that we agree with, we can hear them out with minimal resistance.

To remove friction between your prospective audience and yourself, you should be loud about your ideals and the core idea that drives your content. If your idea resonates with your potential audience, then you’ll have a loyal audience.

Final Thoughts

Sharing your content on social media is no longer a matter of posting links. Now it is more of a copywriting and content marketing job. You have to compete with a flood of content, but since a bulk of it is mediocre, you can succeed with the right strategy and tools. Use ContentFries to implement the repurposing and packaging tips covered in the post above. And make sure that your content stands for an idea worth sharing.