Joomla video marketing

Video marketing is popular. Increasingly, I get requests to add videos to a Joomla website. These include corporate videos, instructional videos and even customer reviews through videos I have come across in the past year. Since hosting them yourself often takes too much disk space and the videos load too slowly, video hosting is often used. In this article, I look at the features, pluses and minuses of Youtube, Vimeo and Wistia.

Youtube

With more than 1 billion users,YouTube is by far the most popular video hosting. YouTube is localised in 75 countries and available in 61 languages. Google owns Youtube and this ensures that Youtube videos' are also visible in search results. Videos can also be integrated with Google Adwords.

When you look at the Youtube website, you see a big difference in quality of content. It is also difficult to stand out among all the videos available on Youtube. This can be solved by displaying (embedding) the videos on your own website. Another disadvantage of YouTube is the advertisements that precede the videos or the pop-up banners at the bottom of the video.

Because Youtube is so popular, some companies block this website for their employees. Even if you embed the video on your website, it will not be viewable to everyone.

Some of the things you can set for YouTube videos are:

• Height and width
• Responsive display
• Display controls
• Display information
• Hide related videos (after completion)
• Automatic playback
• Allow full screen
• Theme (light/dark)

Vimeo

Vimeo is a nice alternative to Youtube. A definite plus is that no ads are shown. Since there is thus no ad revenue for Vimeo, in addition to a free option, they do use paid accounts. A paid account gives you more options, such as adding your own logo or video outro and advanced statistics.

Videos are less likely to be found on Vimeo, simply because there is less traffic to them. Also, these videos are not always found in Google search results.

Vimeo has somewhat fewer options than Youtube:

• Height and width
• Responsive display
• Display title
• Show author
• Show avatar
• Set colour for controls

Wistia

Wistia is the newest player in this market, but is definitely worth checking out. Wistia gives the user extensive statistics. It shows where the visitor started, stopped, rewound or skipped parts of the video. You can use the focus option to make the video stand out by darkening the background during playback. You can place various social media buttons below the video, as well as your own logo, and you can show how many times the video has been played. When visitors go to another page and come back, the video can be resumed.

Wista has a free account where you can upload up to 50 videos. They also have several paid accounts, which are not cheap but give you extras like advanced statistics, subtitles, call-to-action buttons and asking the visitor's email address before the video is shown.

Wista has great options:

• Height and width
• Responsive display
• Automatic playback
• Speed (speed up or slow down playback)
• Resume
• Dark background
• Allow full screen
• Add your own logo
• Social media buttons
• Show volume button
• Set colour for controls