Have I mentioned the importance of using video in your online presence? (ahem…you KNOW I have!)
This can be fun and casual as an extension of your personality and/or company, or directed/targeted in your marketing materials. Just develop your reputation as a person who posts interesting and worthwhile stuff. That means at the very least a still photo, a link to a YouTube video, or — increasingly — the ability to display or embed a video itself in your posts.
In this blog:
- YouTube’s new “card” functionality
- FaceBook’s new embeddable video
- Twitter’s “Periscope”
- online resources for free graphic/video downloads
YouTube launched a new way to annotate your videos…in fact it replaces their unweidly “annotate” feature (although it’s still technically available). It’s’ actually a lot more than annotation. It’s a way to inform your viewers and link to other content you have online. Your account must be in “good standing” (under the “features” heading in your channel settings). Performance reporting for cards is available in YouTube Analytics. You can choose from six types of cards: merchandise, fundraising, video, playlist, associated website, and fan funding.
Google’s step-by-step in setting up cards.
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FaceBook now lets you take public videos that are posted in Facebook and embed them in your own website. I tried to embed a 2-million+-viewed video from FB into this article, and was unsuccessful. But maybe you can do it with your site. I think this is a fairly new development, and from the link I’m about to give you, the article claims WordPress full functionality is coming yet.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/embedded-video-player
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Meerkat is so yesterday! The SXSW sweetheart app that lets you live-stream video on Twitter now has competition from Twitter 
itself in an app called “Periscope“. Periscope’s advantage is that when your broadcast is over, you can make it available for replay, make it private, manage notifications, and track “hearts” (likes).
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‘Not sure what’s in the water, but several online repositories of graphics, pictures, backgrounds, and videos are offering free downloads for 7 days. You usually have to give a credit card, which means you have to mark on your calendar for the day to cancel, or it will automatically roll over to a paid account (anywhere from $49 -$99 per year). They also usually limit you to twenty individual files per day. Hey, but that’s 140 more hi-def images or backgrounds than you had before — for free! Here are two:
CourVO
