One of the most popular angles that mobile marketers are taking to spice up their SMS campaigns involves the embedding of video into their messages.
You can do this using existing online tools freely and easily.
Where host your video
The hardest part of video is creating it, once you have a video you can host it for free on one of the online video sites. YouTube or Vimeo are the best choices as they have extensive CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks) and optimise their video’s for the widest number of mobile devices available. We are going to use YouTube on iPhone in our examples here.
Linking to your YouTube video
After uploading a YouTube video you can easily grab a direct link by clicking the Share button. This will display a pre-shortened link that you can use in your message.
This link eg.http://youtu.be/krBMBBBgj0M is pretty short and you can use it as is. One thing to note is that using this link loads the YouTube mobile site in your browser first rather than opening the video directly in the native video app.
Some would say this is a benefit as it doesn’t force the user to open the video immediately and by landing on a mobile page first it allows for some kind of measurement. In this case the number of views on the YouTube page.
There is only one way that we have found to set a URL that opens the YouTube video immediately in the app and that is by using the longer form URL. eg. http://youtube.com/v/krBMBBBgj0M which is getting a bit long for an SMS link. If you try to shorten this link using a URL shortener it will redirect back to the moble site.
Advanced video linking and analytics
Now for some, the short link via the YouTube page would be just fine, its free and simple and gives a good result. Some however would like a bit less YouTube branding on the page, a shorter, customised link and more detailed analytics on link hits.
The best way to do this is embedding the YouTube video into your own mobile page. You will need access to your own hosting and some basic HTML skills to do this. In a recent post on our Support site we showed you how to optimise images to resize to fit in most browser windows. We can use this same code to embed the YouTube video not forgetting to update the id (in red) for the video.
<!DOCTYPE HTML><html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″>
<title>Burst SMS</title>
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width;”>
<script>
window.onload = function() {setTimeout(function () { window.scrollTo(0, 1); }, 100);}
</script>
<style>
html,body {margin: 0; padding: 0;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spanstyle=&w=160&h=160]
</body>
</html>
Paste this code into a text file and save it as index.html and host it somewhere. You will then get a link to a page that will not redirect and has a lot less branding.
Again the person will need to activate the video by tapping the screen but the trade off in measurability makes it a good choice.
Linking in your message
bit.ly is a free and awesome link shortening service that allows you to create custom URL’s and has great reporting and analytics.
Take your URL that you have with your hosted embedded video and shorten it with bit.ly.
You can even use your own URL or add an extension if it is available. In this case we used http://bit.ly/burstsms
You can now put this link directly in your message.
IMPORTANT: You must keep http:// at the beginning of the URL to keep it as an active link on most phones.
Analytics
As people visit the mobile web URL vis the bit.ly service analytics are generated. You can track lots of interesting stuff and get a detailed report.
Mobile video is a great way to add engagement to your SMS campaigns. It gives great brand impact and is not expensive or difficult when using the techniques outlined here.