How Kings of Leon Use Social Media to Move Up The Charts

Why Kings of Leon? Not because they’re a great band (they are) but because they seem to be doing good things in the social media space…

Facebook

A few weeks ago I saw a post by the band (when I say the band I mean their label’s PR/Advertising/Social media agency). This post was a call to action to their Facebook fans to go out and vote them to the top of the VH1 Top 20.

Now I don’t know whether this worked or not but I do know that over 6000 people ‘liked’ this statement, indicating that a large amount of fans went on and voted for KOL.

Twitter

Looking for Kings of Leon on Twitter presents many unofficial profiles. The profile with the highest number of followers does not look official. There’s no link to a website for a start. It appears to be a list of any sites/blogs mentioning KOL.

So Kings of Leon need to get themselves an official Twitter profile. The unofficial one already has 37,000 followers so they’d better get a move on.

Now Kings of Leon’s management may simply have decided that Twitter is not the best social media channel for them. After all it’s populated by us ‘oldies’ rather than the flippant, peer led, pocket money generation.

Which is probably why they have a good presence on…

Bebo

This is a well organised and designed Bebo page. Over 168,00 fans and links to merchandise, albums and the blog. There is also, of course a link to iTunes allowing fans to purchase tracks should they wish. The comments section shows active participation by fans with regular posts.

And best of all IMHO is the ‘Official’ badge on the Bebo profile letting me know that this is indeed the official page. The Twitter profile could do with having a ‘Verified’ badge on it (if/when they set one up).

YouTube

The Kings of Leon YouTube channel is lacking the branding of the Bebo page. Considering a YouTube channel can be customised with any background or theme, the background on this doesn’t quite add up. It’s not consistent with their other social media presence.

Does this matter? Not really. They have had over 2 million channel views and are the number 64 most viewed music artisist on YouTube (I’d have thought they would be higher?)

Youtube Adds Call-to-Action Overlays

youtube logo

You’ve uploaded your video content to Youtube and can see the view count clocking up. Rubbing your hands with glee you sit back and wait for the viewers to visit your site and buy your product. Except its not that easy – until now.

Call-to-Action

Youtube has now enabled a Call-to-Action functionality, allowing users to direct viewers to a landing page or website with a relevant call to action.

Here’s how it works:

“Adding a Call-to-Action overlay to your video is easy. First, run a campaign to promote your video on YouTube. Then, go to the Video Details page under My Videos and fill out the fields in the section marked “Call-to-Action overlay.” All you have to do is include a short headline, ad text, a destination url, and upload an optional image, and the overlay will appear whenever someone watches your video. Clicks on the overlay will be tracked in YouTube Insight.”

Youtube call to action

Practical Application – Will It Blend

Will it Blend has one on the most successful  products ever marketed on Youtube for the blending company ‘Blendtec. Their videos of various items from i-Phones to Mario Kart games being blended have been a Youtube hit. The i-Phone video alone has had over 6 million views. The trouble is these videos just end with a URL flashing up within the video meaning conversions are no where near as high as they could be. Now, with this latest development, Blendtec may be able to make the most of all these views.

Youtube have been hd

Thats right the most famous video sharing network of them all has gone HD. Is this a necesary addition? No. does it look and sound good? Yes

This seems to be part PR behaviour and part future proofing. As we all know, eventually there will be just a single piece of kit in your living room through which you can access all media formats; TV, music, the internet (and so Youtube) and probably all manner of other things things that haven’t even been thought of yet.

This has garnered a lot of attention and so has done the PR bit well.

By providing videos in an HD format Youtube is making itself the video browsing site of choice for the home viewer of the future. As we have all believed the hype that our non HD TV’s will soon be obslete we may feel validated by the fact that such a market player is heading in this direction.

Glanceable content. Thats the media of the future. Its all around us with Youtube clips, mobile/web only TV shows and mainstream TV programmes like Rudetube being born from the web. As I believe it though, the videos have to be recorded in HD form to be then shown in HD. This can only be done on expensive camcorders. Youtube is the land of the cameraphone so until we have HD quality camera phones…this may be ahead of its time.

social media blog