Many of you accountants are (and you never imagined THIS before the current climate!) running Zoom webinars for your clients with helpful information about COVID-19 (or more specifically all the rules and regulations – or lack thereof – in relation to this crisis).
Now you want to share that recording.
Here are a few tips for how to do that – this is the short & quick version, but we’ll keep adding to this article as we have more suggestions.
Essentially, the video file of your Zoom recording needs to be saved somewhere, and shared somewhere (or multiple somewheres). Typically we’d suggest you download the video file, save it somewhere you will have it for later (like Google Drive) and then upload the video to YouTube or Vimeo. We’ll address which ones to upload them to, and what the benefits are, below.
Download & save Zoom recording
If you ran the webinar on Zoom, you (likely/hopefully) recorded it into the Zoom cloud recordings. So you may be able to simply share that Zoom cloud recording link. Bear in mind a few things. (Read more from Zoom directly, here.)
- Time delay: Recordings have to “process” in Zoom. This can take a few minutes, a few hours, or even a day depending on the length of the call. You can’t access the file or recording until it’s done processing. (Zoom will tell you when it’s ready, either within the account itself or by email, if you’ve set up the notifications that way).
- Cloud recording storage: There are limits on the number of cloud recordings you can keep within Zoom, depending what kind of account you have and what you pay for. If you have too many after a while, Zoom will stop saving them and you can’t use or share them until you delete some. So, if you do decide to share an actual Zoom link (rather than downloading & uploading the file to a video location such as YouTube or Vimeo), remember the storage you do or don’t have available.
- Saving Zoom recordings: The PF team uses an app called Google Drive for Zoom that uploads Zoom recordings directly and automatically to Google Drive, and then you can delete the recordings within Zoom itself but still have the recordings in your Google Drive. Please bear in mind this is NOT an official recommendation to use this app – we’ve just recently started using it ourselves and it seems to be working well so far. If you’re not sure, just manually download the Zoom recording and then upload it to Google Drive or Dropbox. (That’s what we did for a long time. Clunky and manual, but gets the job done.) Then you’ve got the video file for whatever you need.
Decide: Public or private?
Before you upload your webinar recording, decide whether you’re going to make this publicly available, or private to certain people. Both YouTube & Vimeo allow you to upload a video and then designate this as a publicly available video (to anyone with the link) or a private one (only shared to people who have the link, or only shared to certain people, or similar settings). You have the ability to share it with as many or as few people as you like.
Think about what’s in the webinar. Did you hold it as a Zoom meeting, with everyone on video and their names visible on screen? If so, will all of them be comfortable with their face and name being shared to the world? Have you asked permission, or do they care? Right now no one really cares, because the point is just to get answers, but it’s wise to consider your clients and concerns they might have.
If it’s a client-only webinar, you may want to make it privately available, and just share it by email and in a Facebook group for clients.
If you and they don’t mind, and you want to get it out to as many people as possible, then you upload the video (see below) and share it anywhere and everywhere. Remember, when you do that, anyone and everyone is able to watch and share this. With all the content going out at lightning speeds (literally), it probably isn’t going to become….so popular you can’t handle the leads. (We’re not going to use that old word which used to be used for videos being shared super fast like a… like a virus.)
Upload video recording to YouTube or Vimeo
Regardless of which platform you use, do bear in mind how important it is to pay attention to your video’s title, description, and settings. There’s more we could say on this, but for now just remember to think about your audience. Get to the point fast. Don’t be vague, or sound like everyone else. If you call your webinar recording “A COVID-19 update”, there will be thousands if not millions of videos with the same title. If you call it “XYZ Accounting webinar recording coronavirus update”, that’s not very descriptive and they may not really know what’s covered. Be as specific as possible, and say what it actually is. If you cover something specific, such as employees or payroll or funding or budgeting, mention that at least in the description, if not the title.
Please, do NOT leave your video titled with the original zoom webinar recording title, such as “Calendar meeting 26-03-2020 15.03”. That’s like uploading an image and leaving the title as “IMG_4076.png”. It’s not descriptive, no one knows what it’s about (including Google), and it will be hard to find for them, much less you looking it up later!
Why YouTube?
YouTube is best for search engine results (it’s the second biggest search engine after Google) – so having videos on YouTube means your accounting firm is more findable. It’s very easy to upload videos and then either share the direct link, or embed the code into a website or blog post or elsewhere. YouTube also makes it easy to add captions and other editing and sharing settings. It’s always a good idea to upload your video to YouTube
You’ll need to have a YouTube channel to which you can add videos, now and in the future. If you don’t have one already, we suggest setting this up now for your accounting firm (rather than you personally, unless you and the business are the same).
It’s a good thing to have and we’ve long suggested accountants have the five main social media platforms at least set up for your firm – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. You use a Google account to set up a YouTube channel, so use your firm’s Google account to do this.
Make sure you’ve been consistent with your branding across all social media channels – use the right sized logo/icon for the profile image and channel header image, and make it consistent with your accounting firm’s brand. If you haven’t done this yet and don’t have time, you can do it later: but we strongly recommend you do this as soon as possible. You may as well do it now while you’re setting it up – remember, “not perfect but done”! It makes a difference when prospects are coming to your social channels and they see a brand connection to your website and all your other marketing. The team is literally right now writing an article on “the right sizes for social media images” so we’ll link that as soon as it’s ready. If you’re not sure, drop us a note in the PF Marketing Community facebook group.
Remember, when you upload a video to YouTube and share it, or embed it, YouTube itself is going to share ads or suggested videos after yours ends. (You’re well familiar with that from other YouTube videos.) If you’re new to YouTube, and don’t have many videos yet, it’s possible your watcher could get some really odd suggestions (or even really inappropriate ones) following the end of your video. YouTube is still excellent for many reasons – and it’s okay to upload it in multiple places – but this is why we also suggest using Vimeo.
Why Vimeo?
Vimeo is a platform for uploading videos which differs from YouTube because there are no ads. It’s really good for embedding videos into your website or blog post or email in a nice clean way (you can even choose the settings so it does or doesn’t show the video title, creator, captions, etc).
Vimeo was originally more for artists and creators (in the typical ‘creative’ sense), but is used by many companies and businesses, PF included. Please note that in order to share any videos as a business, you must use Vimeo Pro. Vimeo is very specific that businesses may not use the Basic or the Plus versions to share videos. The free account is not for commercial businesses, and Vimeo won’t allow you to keep adding videos if it’s clear you’re a business (which is right to indicate, since you want people to know about your firm). So, if you’re looking at using Vimeo regularly and having the ability to share and embed videos without ads, just pay the monies and get the Pro account.
Which platform do I share my webinar recording on?
You can upload your video to both platforms. How you share it depends on the content, how accessible you do (or don’t) want it, and where you’re putting it.
Vimeo is great for videos you can easily (and cleanly) embed into website pages, blog posts, and emails. You won’t have ads, and you have more control over the settings. We use Vimeo for most PF videos so we can embed them into a website page (like this one, which includes the embed of a webinar video recording).
YouTube is great for quick and easy shares, and for search & findability. Although remember, there are literally billions of videos on YouTube, so it’s going to take a long time to build your following. Don’t expect miracles overnight, especially since the entire accounting world has suddenly discovered video in the past two weeks.
In the below article, we talk about which platform to use for your video content. Note the graph from our Head of Branding, Col Gray, who now has 19,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. Note that it took almost two years to get to 5,000 subscribers, but then the next 5,000 subscribers took only about a month. It’s a slow burn. It starts really really slowly and most people give up before the turnaround comes. This is not a quick win, and right now you’re not sharing videos to get found by all these people. You’re just trying to help people.
Is Vimeo or YouTube better for posting my accounting firm content?
To give you an example, PF runs a weekly content coaching group called Accelerator, which is private to the members only. We record it, upload it to Vimeo privately, and share the private link only with members. We don’t upload it to YouTube because it’s not searchable.
Conversely, when we record a webinar for any accountants, or one of the team records a video we want everyone to be able to watch, we upload it to our PF Vimeo channel and make it publicly available. Then the video which is there on Vimeo we can embed where we like, such as this webinar recording on the Marketing Map page, or this series of webinar recordings on a summary page. We (sometimes) also add it to our YouTube channel, but in full transparency we’ll admit we haven’t been doing that so much. It’s on our list. (Imagine, having things you haven’t got round to yet! ha!)
Sharing your webinar recording video
Okay. Now we’ve finally gotten to what you really wanted to know originally, which was, how and where do I share this thing?
Now that you have your video uploaded (either to YouTube or Vimeo or both), you can share it in different ways depending on the platform.
The first question is, do you want to embed the video, or share the link? Embedding it means you get website code that drops the video into a website page or blog post (or somewhere else) so you’re not linking away from the page. This is really useful if you don’t want to send people AWAY from your website, but want them to stay there and just watch the video. Remember, once they link away to YouTube or Vimeo or a social account or something else, the chances of their being distracted and forgetting what they came for are very high. (Been there myself many a time, and I know you have too.)
Either platform gives you an ’embed code’, and you can use their help or knowledge base functions to get all that detail. Basically, if you want the video to play within a website page, blog post, or email, you’ll want the embed code. How and where you put the code depends on what website platform or email system you’re using, so talk to your website people or to PF if you need detailed help. (Here’s our team email address.)
You’ll also get a video link (a URL) which you can share wherever you like. Something like this.
Ideally, you want to share your recording on your own website. It’s the only one that belongs entirely to you, and is your platform. If you share the video link, people will just share that. If you embed it into your website and share that link everywhere, when people want to share it with others they’ll be sharing your entire website.
Sharing your Zoom webinar recording in a website, blog, or email:
- Website page: Get the embed code, copy it, and paste it into your page. Or you can link a button that says “Watch recording now”, or wording like that.
- Blog post: Same as above, or you can highlight the words, like this and link those to the video.
- Email: Depending on your email platform, you’ll likely be able to embed the video into the email using the video URL – but check their support to see what’s best. Just as with a website page or blog post, you could link words, link a button, or embed the video. Remember to think about the reader’s experience: what’s the easiest, fastest way for them to watch this video without too many clicks? And without sending them too far away from your email or website?
Sharing your Zoom webinar recording on social media
For social media, the way you share the video depends on the platform itself. Each platform has different ways of prioritising videos, different lengths of video you can share, and all kinds of detail.
Remember, embedding your video on a website page or in a blog post on your site means that when you share the link on socials, you’re sharing your own website. Not just a video link.
For all of these platforms, remember to make your post sound human. A good tip is to think about ONE person you know who has asked for this information. How are they feeling? What are they worried about? What would help them to say, “Oh, this is exactly what I was wondering – I’ll watch this video”? For example, if you specifically talk to self employed joiners, you could title it “Webinar: Support for self employed joiners during COVID19”. Then they know it’s for them and will be more likely to watch it and share it. You could pull out a specific quote, or at least say who is on the webinar and why. (Some of you are running webinars with guest speakers who are in HR or legal, and you could name them, too.)
Also, remember that every social platform ultimately prioritises “native” video more than any of the other platforms. Native video means you’ve uploaded the video directly to the platform, rather than sharing a link.
The length of a native video varies depending on the platform, but I’m presuming with your Zoom webinar it’s probably between 30-60 minutes, which means you’re not going to share it “natively”, you’re going to share it via link, which is fine. But in case you’re interested, the native video length limits at the time of writing this article (they change) are:
- LinkedIn: 10 minutes
- Facebook: 240 minutes
- Twitter: 2 minutes
- Instagram post: 1 minute
- IGTV (Instagram video): 60 minutes
How to share your video link on the main social media platforms:
Facebook: Share your link with a summary description of what it’s about. Usually Facebook will pull from the video description you filled in when uploading the video (title, description, author, length), but you can add more to make it human and real.
Twitter: Same as Facebook, but remember the limitations on a Twitter post – no more than 280 characters. Get to the point really fast. I often suggest you write your Twitter post first, because it forces you to say the bare minimum and not faff about with unnecessary words. Then you can take what you’ve written and paste it into your Facebook or LinkedIn post, and add more detail.
LinkedIn: More than any other platform, LinkedIn prioritises native video. This means if you share a post with a link in the original post, only a few people will really see it. (Unless you tag lots of people, share it separately, and work really hard at getting it more visible.) I’ve done a few posts with a link and had maybe 4 or 5 views, and then shared a native video (under 10 mins) and put the link in the comments, and had hundreds or thousands of views.
If you want to share a link to your video, you can write a post with information and then say “link to webinar recording in comments”, and after you hit post, comment on your own post with the link to your website page or blog post where the video sits. I suggest giving some detail about the video and what’s in it – perhaps a list of the topics covered, and tagging people who were speaking or attending, and using hashtags. Remember our points above about making it relevant to ONE person. Have that one person in your mind, and write like a real human. Don’t try to sound all professional and official or it will be boring and sound like everyone else’s. This has always been true, but now more than ever. No one has time for fancy words. Say what you need to say.
Note, you can also write a linkedin article, and embed the video within that article or link to it there. This is useful if you have more to say about it. Note this can end up being similar or same content as you’d put in a blog post, but it’s okay to put that content in both places. Google doesn’t penalise you for sharing your own content on a blog post and in a LinkedIn article.
Instagram: It’s harder to share video that is not native to Insta (ideally you’re recording video directly within Insta and then sharing it). Also, you can’t share links within an Instagram post (I mean you can, but they’re not clickable, and people can’t highlight the words and paste them, so it makes it really difficult and no one’s going to do all that work). You are better off putting the link in your bio. (Note, you can edit your Insta bio to include only ONE link, so if you have more than one link to share, use something like Linktree. That enables you to have one URL which opens up lots of different link options within Instagram.)
If you really want to share a webinar recording on Insta, I’d suggest clipping out a short 1 minute section of the video, sharing that as a post, and then saying “link in bio”. Then put your website/blog URL either as your one link in your bio, or add it to Linktree and give it a description so people can pick the link they want.
Remember these things
Most importantly, remember these things:
- Not perfect but done. Just get it out there. You can fix details later.
- Share it with your clients first. Make sure they have first, and easiest, access to this webinar. That’s who it’s for. (Anyone else seeing it is a bonus.)
- If it’s not private, make it easily shareable and encourage them to share it with others.
- Keep sharing it (as long as the content is current). Social media is like raging river rapids: continually changing, constantly swirling, new things all the time. You could post this same link to all the socials every few days and people would still say “Oh, I never saw that!”
- Ask for help if you get stuck.