Using Viral Sharing

You probably want as many people as possible to view your videos. One of the best ways to do this is to make it easy for your viewers to share your videos with their friends and social networks, a process called viral sharing. The viral promotion tools built into the Video Cloud player are designed to give you control over how viral sharing options are presented to your viewers.

Choose a default viral player

Pick a single-video player to be your default viral player. The viral player is the Video Cloud player that's used when a viewer uses the "Get code" feature to grab the player and put it in their own blog or other web page. Read more about setting the default viral player for your account.

Video Tutorial: Default Viral Player

While the default viral player is a simple single video player, you can customize your viral player and take other steps to make sure that your brand travels with your virally-distributed content. Consider some of the tips in this article about customizing a player in a brand-conscious way.

Make sure your videos can be shared

When you add a video to your Video Cloud media library, it is already enabled for viral sharing. Viral sharing can be turned off for videos in the Media module, on the Edit Videos > Distribution tab. To maximize viral sharing, make sure that for each video, the Allow viral distribution setting is Yes.

Set the viral promotion tool options for your players

Video Cloud players have built-in tools to promote viral sharing. You can choose the viral promotion tools your players use in the Publishing module's Edit Player Settings dialog. The viral promotion options are on the Video Player tab. Two of the options are closely related and easy to confuse: 

• The Get Link button presents the viewer with a direct link to the player and a button that copies the link to the clipboard, so it can be pasted into an email or instant message:

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• The Share button presents the viewer with the sample link and the Copy Link button for pasting into an email or instant message, but also provides two additional buttons to share the video directly on Facebook or Twitter:

Since these two options overlap, you probably don't want to enable both of them in the same player. Enable "Get Link" if you want to present just the Copy Link button for sharing through email or IM, and enable "Share (Get link and social sharing)" if you want the Copy Link button as well as the Facebook and Twitter buttons.

Using a custom URL for player linking

By default, the sharing link for a player points to the Video Cloud-hosted player. In many cases, that's the cleanest, most friendly way to make a video available for viral sharing. However, you might want instead to give viewers links that point to the parent page on your site that contains the player (or to some other page altogether). Read Customizing the link URL for detailed information about how to do this. You can also use the Video Cloud Player API to create a sharing link that goes directly to the selected playlist and video. Read about this deep linking approach.

See also this related material:

Video Tutorial: Hosting on your URL