Vimeo - Best Practices for Specific Platforms

- Vimeo is a platform that offers both free plans and paid plans. And I would strongly suggest you to step up to one of their paid plans to use this as a professional tool in your social media toolbox. One of the first levels is the Vimeo Plus plan, and the pricing may vary in your country, but it's about $84 a year. This offers incredible statistics about what people are watching and consuming. You do have an annual limit of how much content you can upload, that's 250 gigabytes. It's not the upload size, it's the storage size once the video is compressed. You can also easily customize the player, choosing which buttons appear. So if you don't want recommended videos to appear, or you don't want people to see a branded thumbnail, or what color the player is, you can change all of that, so it better integrates with your website. This gives you the ability for groups and channels and very useful albums for sharing work. What I also like is the privacy controls, so you can set passwords on individual videos or albums, or restrict which domains can have embedded content. For example, we have a large library of consumer-facing video content that we've created on Vimeo. I can choose which domains allow that content for playback, but at the same time, set the entire library to private. So nobody except my editors, and content creators who are doing blog posts in social media can see it. When they post the content, It can go out to social networks because I've whitelisted those. It could appear on Facebook, it can appear on our blog. But the videos can't be found when you search, nor can they be embedded except by us. These advanced privacy controls are very useful. If you keep looking at the plans, you'll see that there's options like Vimeo Pro that steps up to around $240 per year. This gives you a lot more storage and additional plays as well as some limits. But it does allow for commercial content to be hosted. This means that you can actually sell your content. And if you want to have video on demand or OTT services, you can drive that. You'll also get advanced statistics and portfolios, as well as a review and approval platform, which is quite useful for posting videos for clients to watch and then leave comments during the editing process. It also allows for team members, so multiple people have permission to post. This way, if you are a production company, you can control that multiple people have access without sharing usernames or passwords. If you step up to higher level plans, there's Vimeo Business and even Enterprise plans. These start to get into the $600 a year or higher range, but they do start to give you options for storing the original files. This allows you to upload something like an Apple ProRes file and store it for backup. This way you, you have cloud backup of your productions, not only are you delivering streaming files, but you've backed up the originals for archival purposes. You'll also find great tools for call to action advertising, the ability to build in links, driving things like donations, fundraising, selling of other products, it really is a commercial tool. You'll also get Google Analytics that you can use to analyze the results and the traffic and the ability to capture email leads. If you're just a content creator wanting to share your video, you don't need this. But if you're using video as a tool to drive commerce, additional sales, donations, signups, etc., this is important. If video is a part of your company's marketing strategy, this type of account gives you a whole wealth of tools that you won't get with a platform like YouTube. I like the ability to create custom portfolios with work samples. We've built several portfolios up for different clients, and the ability to have password protected work samples. So I can invite potential customers to see different work, but they can't download it. I can revoke access, they can't share it with others. This way, they can log in and see work samples that we don't have the rights to display publicly. But we can control access, and it's wonderfully useful. You can even brand these with fonts and colors and other information to make it more visually appealing. Use this as an opportunity to really control what people see and how they see it. Both YouTube and Vimeo should be a part of your toolbox and they each have strengths. YouTube is going to be great for getting a mass audience. And Vimeo is going to be great for commercial uses that give you more tools for advertising or measuring the effectiveness of your content. I would suggest you explore each and decide what's the right mix. Chances are that both will fit into your toolbox but maybe in slightly different ways.

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