Should I upload Multimedia content, on Social Networks or My Server ? [kwiqq]

Posted on | April 16, 2009 | View Comments

Upload content on social networks ?

A good online marketing campaign often means several initiatives like blogs, white papers, viral videos, images etc. The question often arises, where should marketers upload this data ?

Lets take an example, say a second hand car dealership writes a blog on the latest cars. In order to make it more interactive they insert pictures and videos. The million dollar question is, “Would you upload this to your site/blog or to a third party social network like YouTube, Flickr ?” Lets explore both the scenarios:

Why host content (on your servers)

Hosting content can have several advantages:

• More control over the content and no arguments on who owns the data. You are also in control of the privacy and its remarkably easy to leave social content behind.
• Its fantastic for your sites PageRank (PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to web content).
• You can display content on your site without any restrictions, you are not oblidged to follow any third party rules to what data can be uploaded.

As it turns out hosting content on your own servers makes sense for big publishers whose value proposition is the content itself. We are referring to big players i.e. Guardian Media Group, CNN, BBC etc of the world.

Why use Social Networks

• Makes your content more discoverable. In our example of a car dealership, users can do a random search on car images on Flickr and could be lead to the dealerships blog.
• Dramatically reduces cost of hosting bandwidth intensive multimedia on your servers
• Managing data on social networks is generally easier as you have a good interface to upload and modify content.
• In my experience users don’t care if the data is uploaded on your server or a third party social networks. They only want a reliable source to view the multimedia.

It turns out uploading content to social networks generally works for brands for whom content is a means to sell their product/service. Examples: Nike Football on YouTube, Nikon cameras on Flickr etc.  Even some of the major content providers like Nuts magazine owned by IPC media use sites like YouTube.

Suggestions for content social networks

• Photos: Flickr.com
• Videos: YouTube / Vimeo
• White Papers: Scribd.com
• Presentations: SlideShare.net
• Mobile streaming: Qik.com
• Large Files: Box.net
• Blog: WordPress.com / Tumblr.com

Summary

After a quick analysis its easy to see that the principle reason for using social networks is content promotion. It makes content more discoverable and easy to manage, although uploading content on your servers puts you in control.

Comments