Friday, March 11, 2016

GTChannel and Network Partner SmurfinWRX Collaborate on Top 6 Drifting Videos




Recently we had an awesome opportunity to collaborate with one of our top creators in our network, SmurfinWRX. We asked Mike (SmurfinWRX) to host a Top 6 Drift Videos countdown show for our channel. His channel started blowing up mid 2015 and we thought it would be a great chance to collaborate and further promote his channel and also get a fresh face to host a show on our channel too.

Watch the video and leave your comments and let us know what you think.

We want to do more and more of these types of collaboration projects in the future with our network partners.  If you have a show idea you want to pitch, you can also reach out to us. You know how to get in touch with us!

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Are You Using Facebook Videos To Grow Your Audience?

Facebook reported in their 2015 financial report that 100 million hours of video is being watched everyday. That is still very small compared to the 6 billion hours of video watched by YouTube everyday. But Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that "Video is an important part of the Facebook experience", and the company will continue to put resources into video. It's apparent that videos directly uploaded to Facebook have WAY better reach than YouTube links on your timeline. That's Facebook's unfair advantage it has as it can control what gets seen and what doesn't.

In October the social media team at GTChannel started to aggressively upload videos on to Facebook to increase our Page Likes and Reach.


We started at 240,000 likes in October and now we are at 314,00 and growing at an average rate of about 1,700-2,000/week.  This rate is also growing. Our goal is to reach 1M likes by the end of the year and we are trying new things everyday.

So here is what you should be doing now.

STEP 1 Create a Page.
If you don't have a Page yet, firstly you should create a Page on Facebook. Personal accounts have a limit of 5,000 friends and you also don't need to fill your personal timeline with car stuff all of the time. Pages have more features fit for what you are trying to do as a creator. You also don't want to annoy your aunts, uncles and friends who aren't into cars as much as you are. Your Page is your essentially your Facebook version of a YouTube Channel so include all of the vital information about your brand here. After you've created your page, you can go ahead and invite your friends who will appreciate your page.


STEP 2 Start Uploading Videos!
You will be really surprised with the difference videos do on Facebook compared to regular posts. But what kind of videos should I post?
Keep the long stuff for your YouTube Channel and put up shorter versions, outtakes and more viral moments on Facebook.  People's watching habits reflect which videos do well on Facebook.  Facebook videos do better on day one but YouTube videos do better in the long haul. Check out the GTChannel Facebook page as a reference and see what we are doing.  We're not just sharing our own stuff, we share everything we feel our audience will like. Even sharing Facebook videos have a greater reach than regular posts!

STEP 3 Use TEXT In Videos
Continuing on from people's watching habits...Facebook videos are all auto play but muted.  They start playing when you scroll down on your timeline.  But they are all muted so inserting large text in the first 10-15 seconds of your videos helps drastically to get people to click to listen or watch the entire video.  Once you got them hooked, you have a  better chance of them commenting, liking or even sharing that video.


STEP 4 Learn From Insights


Facebook Insights has gotten better and we can learn a lot about what is working and what is not. Don't just shoot blindly. Take a second to see the stats, learn from it and then repeat.

As a network of automotive creators, we feel it is important for our creators to get as much reach as possible. Facebook will soon roll out with a monetizing platform and we don't want to wait until then to start growing an audience. We all need to start uploading more videos to Facebook because more and more people are watching videos on Facebook.

-TK