What does this mean for Buto users: good news. The Buto player is designed to share seamlessly with Facebook and appear in users feeds when shared:

This means that – unlike YouTube – your content retains its brand, in-player ads and links back to your site.

A powerful way of driving views and traffic from the 3rd most popular video destination – something our customers are doing every day.

1.  Make sure it’s well encoded.

Check your web video platform does the encoding for you and upload the highest quality version you can find. You might like to check support for non-flash devices like iPhone and iPad – although iPhone is just 6% of the handset market, it accounts for roughly 60% of mobile browsing.

2.  Put video in the right place on your site.

The homepage isn’t necessarily the place where people want to discover what your film’s telling them. By including video on product pages and at key points during the purchase journey, you can increase conversion and reduce cart abandonment. Teaser trailers and video reviews are a great way to drive traffic to your site and also increase browser to buyer conversion.

3.  Make it possible to share your content away from your site so viewers, bloggers and ‘social media gurus’ can post it around the web for you. 

Integrated sharing controls and embed codes make it possible for your viewers to act as your advocates by sharing the content around the web: increasing your reach and brand awareness.

4.  Know your goals.

Work out what the call to action is and make sure it’s easy for them to click through to it when they’ve watched the film. Use analytics and duration monitoring to measure the performance of your video and adjust your call to actions for maximum impact.

5.  Create your own in-video adverts to generate results.

In-video adverts are intuitive and unobtrusive. Viewers don’t mind hiding them, and will click them readily if the action is appealing. People are much more likely to click an advert that is directly related to the content they’re watching (for example ‘drop into basket’, ‘donate now’ or ‘download product spec’).

6.  Try using playlists to give viewers access to multiple films and choose what they want to watch.

This could reduce the amount of space on your site that you need to dedicate to video, but still give people access to a great range of content.

7.  Switch on comments.

Film is great currency in social media terms and comments mean your viewers can engage in a conversation. Most systems allow comment moderation.

8.  For additional brand exposure, try inserting a pre-roll (such as a motion graphics ident) at the beginning of all your videos. 

This gives you an ad platform each time your video is seen away from your site.

9.  Find out how well your content is working.

Good analytics will let you know how many people have watched each film, where they are, where they saw it if it’s been shared and how much of it they watched. Try A/B testing to work out how effective your video is.

10.  Make sure everyone can access your content.

Closed captioning, keyboard controls and transcripts will make sure people aren’t left out.

There is a free 30 day trial of Buto available, sign up in 30 seconds.

Smart Playlists are a great example. You can set up a series of rules, for example; most viewed videos tagged ‘cats’ last week – and a smart playlist is automatically generated.
This playlist has an “embed” code like any other, and can be added to your site, to a blog or forum – or shared on social networks.

The really cool part is that Buto will automatically keep this playlist up to date, changing and re-ordering the content daily based on the rules you’ve set. Ideal for “top 10″ pages, category home-pages or building an on-demand channel of your content.

We’ve built some great tools into Buto to allow you to do just that. Let’s focus on the Batch Organiser.

You might want to group some videos together to perform an action on them – for example: add them to a folder, a playlist, or even delete them.

Rather than searching around and working on these individually, the Batch Organiser lets you drag and drop videos from folder views, search results or the main video browser. Just pop-up the organiser from the bottom left of the Buto control panel.

Once they’re in a batch, click “Process batch” and you can perform an action on them.

It’s one of the more intuitive ways to manage your video library. Enjoy!

There is a free 30 day trial of Buto available, sign up in 30 seconds.

We’re dedicated to helping you distribute video to a wider audience, which is why we’ve built an iPhone app for Buto customers.

Publish video to the app, moderate comments and more – all from the Buto control panel in seconds.

Your audience can post comments, add favourites and of course: watch your video in stunning quality: right on the iPhone (or iPod touch) in either 3G or WiFi networks. The app will even detect the connection and adjust the video quality accordingly.

If you’ve built an “in-player advert” in Buto, this will show up on the app too – allowing your viewers to tap-through to respond to your call-to-action. Build it once in Buto – publish to every device.

We’ve produced an example using content from Big Button (our film & video sister company) which you can download for free on iTunes: Buto iPhone app for Big Button.

If you’re a Buto customer and you’d like to set up your iPhone video application – please get in touch.

We’ve got the answer.

Link your Buto account to your YouTube account (using the API) and you can publish a clip from Buto to YouTube in one click.

That’s it. One click: you’re finished. Every new clip you upload, hit the Publish to YouTube button and it’s done in seconds.

It’s early days, but we’ve aggregated all the in-player advert statistics across all our customers over the past 10 days. The results show an average click-through rate of 7% across the board. This is many hundreds of times higher than banner ads, and way higher than text-only ads on web pages.

What’s more: as our customers refine their ads over time, we can expect this rate to rise.

The feature can be used both to drive traffic back to your site from social networks or blogs, or to drop items in a basket if viewers like what they see in the video.

We’ll keep an eye on the stats and update with more data when we’ve generated it. You can test drive the feature with a free 30 day trial of Buto.