Winning at YouTube with Anna Connell

Anna Connell, BNZ’s Social Manager presented “How to win at YouTube” at our final Content Strategy MeetUp for 2014.

Content strategy meetup and winning at youtube with @annagconnell

A photo posted by @jamjar on

A super presentation, full of information, examples, and Anna’s unique insight into the world of social media, with particular focus on youtube.com. It was especially good to hear her say that we’ve got a long way to go in New Zealand to make the most of the YouTube platform. I certainly feel that video is big and can get a hell ova lot bigger. There are so few people getting the really big numbers that overseas brands and vloggers generate with video content.

Anna kinda bamboozled a few of the business people there with her lack of solid numbers on ROI and analytics. She likened social analytics to balloon animals in that we can make the numbers say pretty much anything we need them to say. That mostly we’re in social media because everyone’s on social media, not necessarily because engagement has a direction line to converting sales. 

I liken companies being on social media to all the variant toothpaste styles Colgate might have. It’s not about being about whitening one’s teeth as it is about crowding out the competition on the supermarket shelves. If BNZ didn’t carve out the space on youtube.com and Twitter and Facebook etc, then that space might be filled with their smaller competitors. We might say the same about our University social accounts dominating the smaller, less resourced tertiary education institutions. Oh yeh, it’s about the conversation too. Ahem.

One of the biggest take-aways from Anna’s talk was the idea of structuring the content of a youtube channel. She suggested we have three types of video content:

  • Hero - this content is the entertaining stuff; possibly if we’re lucky it caught the audience’s attention and they loved it, shared it, and it drove new viewers to our channel.
  • Hub - once those new visitors were at our channel we have other supporting content; maybe the “making of” that Hero video and what about a bloopers’ reel to convince our new visitors that it’s worth subscribing to our channel because we generate consistent content they’d be interested in watching more of.
  • Hygiene - then there’s the content we make for the fans; the nitty-gritty how tos, the detailed content about our product or our services, the stuff that our die-hard fans want to watch.

Anna suggested checking out Volvo Trucks and GoPro on youtube.com as an excellent example of this kind of channel structure.

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