Enabling Social Sharing
Sharing of videos through Facebook, Twitter, blogs and email can dramatically increase reach across the web. See this blog post on sharing for more info and some hints.
We've developed a method for you to easily enable social sharing options in your Bits on the Run players (note that this includes functionality to have videos play inline in Facebook posts!). This document explains what the various options are, and what works best in a situation.
Sharing Options
Getting started is quite easy. Simply go to the dashboard "players" tab and click on a player to edit it. In the general section of the player properties you will find the Sharing dropdown selector:
The four options of the dropdown do the following:
- No sharing will not display any sharing options.
- Facebook/Twitter shortcuts displays two buttons in the player that when clicked share a video to Facebook or tweet it using Twitter. The screenshot above demonstrates what this looks like.
- Overlay with link displays one button in the player, to a dedicated sharing overlay. This overlay contains the Facebook/Twitter links again, as well as a text field for copy/pasting the video URL (e.g. into an email).
- Overlay with link and embed same as above, but now includes an embed code for the video. It can be used to place the video on third-party blogs.
Here is an example player that contains an overlay with embed code:
Different Player
By default, when a video is re-embedded on a blog or Facebook, the player from the original embed is used. In most cases, this should work fine, but there may be circumstances that prevent this player from re-embedding. For example, the player may be setup with preroll advertisements that can only be displayed on the original site.
To work around this issue, a second dropdown selector can be found below the Sharing selector when social sharing is enabled (see the screenshot above). This selector contains all the video players you have configured and saved in your account. Here you can select a video player to use for all re-embeds of this video, instead of the current player.
A powerful feature of this setup is that the re-embedded player can be updated real-time. For example, you can update the embedded player to include a click-able watermark which will direct visitors back to your site.
Sharing Links
By default, players will share a link to the preview page when a video is shared. These preview pages are straightforward, unbranded HTML pages that contain the video player, as well as the proper HTML <meta> tags to allow embedding in Facebook.
Here's an example preview, and below is how a shared video player (as opposed to link) displays in Facebook. Clicking the thumbnail will start the video inline.
Override these preview links by setting the link property of videos (in the Metadata tab on the the video details page). You should set it to the URL of the webpage that contains your video, just like the preview page did.
If you set these links to your own pages, but still want the video to work when shared to Facebook, you will have to add some additional metadata to the head of your page that tells Facebook there is a video embedded. See the Facebook video sharing guide for more information on these headers.
Please note that you can only share one video per page to Facebook, though having one video per page is also a requirement for video SEO. You should do this anyhow.