The Best Practices In Video Hosting for Business

Video marketing has become a powerful tool to promote your business in today’s online world. Through the videos you make you are able to tell your story to your audience and connect with them in an influencing and interactive way. Studies and surveys reveal that videos can make wonders as they are becoming a critical part of successful online marketing campaign.

According to Unbounce, a company that has been providing landing page services since 2009, including a video on your website landing page can help increase conversion rates by 80%. Recent statistics on online video marketing show that marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users and social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.

HighQ recently published an interesting data on why 2017 will be the year of video marketing. Data says that by 2017, online video will account for 74% of all web traffic 33% of tablet owners watch about an hour of video on their devices every day, the data reveals.

65% of video viewers watch more than 3/4 of a video and 69% of professionals in marketing, sales, and business fields have used video marketing and another 31% are planning to, according to the data. Is that all convincing to make an impressive video for your business? I hope, yes.

What is video hosting?

Video hosting services or video hosting websites allow individuals to upload their personal or business videos and to watch them legally. You have made your video that tells your brand story and is able to engage your audience, influence them, and converse with them. Now, you need to put it online. Video hosting website is here for your help.

Business video hosting is important for a number of reasons. You can share and update your product information with the customers, educate them on your products, and advertise your business in an interactive way.

Video hosting websites are usually called as video sharing websites. These websites help your business video go viral and reach millions of viewers. But, which website or video hosting platform is the best is a million dollar question since there is a lot. Choosing the right hosting platform is a real challenge and need careful thought. Choosing the right video host that fits your business video objective can make all the difference with your video marketing campaign.

Why Professional Video Hosting is Better for Business

When it comes to the video hosting website for your business, you want to make sure that the host you choose will help you and your business hold up well in present and future.

Firstly, there is no one ‘the best’ way to host your video online. Each platform has pros and cons. For business video, i would suggest you to go for a paid video hosting service over a free one like YouTube. Professional video hosting provides an alternative to free services.

Video hosting services which are paid provides many crucial benefits that free hosts don’t, like customer support and security. Paid services are far better if you are looking to drive traffic to your business website and increase your leads and conversions, or need a detailed performance analytics.

Here I tell you five major reasons for why you should prefer a professional business video hosting service over free hosts.

Customer support: Lack of customer support is the major drawback of a free video hosting website. Free video hosts don’t provide customer support. At the same time, professional video hosts will be available for your help and support to solve any problem you may face when working with your video on their platform and they make sure you got a positive experience.

Performance analytics

Professional video hosting services provides you the performance analytics of your videos in a way that you want. They tell you how many people watched your videos, how much they watched, and which part engaged them most. Free hosts never give you the data you want to see.

Security

Professional video hosts are reliable and have advanced security procedures that free hosts don’t. Like in YouTube scraping, in free hosting platforms people can grab all data including your video name, description, and keywords and can make an exact copy of your video. With paid host, you have control over who is watching your videos and can share private content with confidence.

Branding

Free hosts serve ads on their players. You can never remove them completely. These ads might also deviate the attention of your customers from your content. You don’t face this ‘ads’ problem in a professional platform.

Community

Of course, the YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine and the largest social media network. Your brand can get a wide exposure with free hosts. But if you want more refined target market and showcase something of quality, paid hosts are better options.

Best Professional Business Video Hosting Platforms (YouTube Alternatives)

Now, I tell you about some best professional business video hosting platforms that are also best alternatives to free hosting services.

YouTube tends to be a default option when it comes to video hosting as it is the second most popular search engine in the world. However, its unwelcome and invasive ads, slow file uploads, and poor customer service have compelled corporate clients to look for a best alternative.

Here are some of these best YouTube alternatives for business video hosting.

Wistia

Wistia provides an efficient platform for business video hosting. If you’re looking to get a better understanding of your video performance, this host offers useful analytical tools even with a free account. For each view of your video, Wistia generates a heat map that shows you exactly which parts the viewer watched, skipped and rewatched. Wistia gives you full control over the branding and customization of the video player. Other features of this incredible video host include the calls to action options, advanced privacy settings, possibility to add social sharing options and collect viewer’s emails, etc.

website: https://wistia.com/

Brightcove

Brightcove has highly customizable video hosting options offering live event streaming, advanced analytics, mobile optimization, lead generating tools, among others. Brightcove uses a video cloud that runs an HTML5 video player which provides high-quality video streaming across all devices. It offers extensive security settings, training materials, and 24/7 customer support.
Vidyard: Though the plans of this video host are more expensive than other paid options, the benefits include a huge number of features and an easy-to-use dashboard. This video hosting service is well known for its ability to identify and track individual video viewers, and to push the viewing activity data into marketing automation and CRM systems for better analytic insights.

website: https://www.brightcove.com/en/

SproutVideo

This video host stands out for its great features and services as it offers heat maps, graphics, and detailed analytics.  SproutVideo features include engagement metrics, sharing buttons, multiple video themes and layouts, lead capture and calls to action. It also allows you to create your own video website using unbranded, ad-free players that you can customise according to your brand.

website: https://sproutvideo.com/

Vimeo Business

This is the second largest video hosting platform with 280 million monthly users. Users can customize their player to fit their brand image and add calls-to-action with email collectors to generate leads and improve engagement. This video hosting service also integrates with Google Analytics to give users access to engagement graphs that track performance of videos and show what interests viewers the most.
Reasons for Why You Should Not Host Your Own Videos

website: https://vimeo.com/business

Self-hosting means that you upload the video file to your site. Self-hosted video is never a good idea for your business. There are multiple advantages to hosting your own videos. The following are major reasons for why you should not host your own videos.

Bandwith: If you upload large files such as videos, your bandwidth can easily be used up when multiple users are playing your video at the same time. This will cause your video to load slowly or not play at all if you exceed your limitation. This will even cause your entire website to slow down.

Slow loading: Self-hosted videos cause slow loading. When video file resides on a single server with a limited bandwidth, users who attempt to watch your video might have a negative experience.

Piracy: Self-hosted videos are never safe or secured as they can be downloaded and redistributed illegally on file sharing sites. Self-hosted videos have source codes that can easily be accessed.

Video conversion: By hosting the video on your website you will have the responsibility for converting the file so that it is compatible on all the different devices. This is not an easy task at all.

Traffic: By self-hosting you will not be able to drive traffic to your website as you may face competition with popular video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo where most people looking for materials.

Storage limit: If you frequently upload video files to your server you could eventually exceed the amount of storage space provided by your hosting account. You will need to upgrade your plan and increase the storage limit.

Analytics: With self-hosted videos you will not be able to measure their performance. You won’t know how many views has it had, how long are your videos being watched for and all.

If sum up, video marketing is one of the best strategies to promote your business and professional or paid video hosting platforms are best to upload your business videos. And never go for self-hosting.