←
→

Be our Tweetheart: Video follow buttons and Twitter plays

Feb 12 2013

It's almost Valentine's Day, a holiday that's all about making connections, and we've got a couple fun surprises for our favorite tweethearts (spoiler alert: that's you!). In short, we've made Wistia and Twitter play better together. So that everyone can connect better.

The Twitter Follow Lab

Take your relationships to the next level with our new Twitter Follow Lab! With this new Lab, you can add clickable follow buttons right in your video. Videos are perfect for building emotional connections, and the Twitter Follow Lab introduces a simple and subtle way to nudge your viewers to engage more deeply. You can add as many buttons as you want, controlling how and when they pop up.

Visit the Twitter Follow Lab!

Some of you might remember the old Wistia Labs, but for those of you who don't, for a Lab, you have to go outside the SuperEmbed Builder and paste your Embed code to access the add-on. Think of it as a sneak peek of our Research and Development factory...

Twitter Cards

Twitter cards are now compatible with Wistia videos! What does that mean? It means that when you promote a video from within your Wistia account, it'll show up inline in Twitter. This is a great way to get more exposure for your content and further engage with all those new followers you're getting using the Follow Lab! We're working with Twitter on compatibility for videos embedded on your own domain, so keep your eyes peeled.

Try out the Twitter Follow Lab and other powerful Wistia tools!

Sign up for a free account.

Alyce (118 Posts)

Content Strategist


Tags: ,

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2013 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Product Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Bill

    nice!

  • http://www.facebook.com/educsis Edwin Orellana

    where are the twitter follow buttons on this video??¡¡¡??

  • esii.

    I cant see the button and I’m not on an iOs device..

  • http://www.osiaffiliate.com/ Affiliate Software

    I like this new twitter feature. It will help to grow our twitter audience. Great addition.

  • Benjamin McCormack

    There seems to be a lot of potential here. If I can add twitter-related calls-to-action mid video, what’s preventing *any* type of call to action mid-video? This looks fantastic!

  • http://twitter.com/livewirefilms LiveWire Films

    You guys are MAD GENIUSES!! I am curious to know how much of a Twitter following increase Wistia (3033), Brendan (855), Chris (2748) & Jeff (590) had as a result of this post! I bet pretty awesome.

  • http://demandleap.com/ Rob Trube

    This is a COOL feature! By gaining them as a follower on Twitter will allow you to also begin to integrate them with most marketing automation platforms like Optify or HubSpot, as well as a social media monitoring tools like HootSuite. Video is the conversion secret sauce – and you guys just made it even better! Nice!

  • Ezra Fishman

    And if you could pass that info and all viewing history right into the automation platforms? ;-) The future is going to be bright!!

  • Phil

    Cool feature, Wondered if you guys are offering any of the functionality on leadplayer (like opt in boxes)? cheers.

  • monica lee

    Okay THIS is a nice feature!!!!

  • Ezra Fishman

    you have a keen eye for the future my friend! I’ll tell Max to get back to work this instant.

  • Allison

    Cool feature! We’ll definitely be using this. How did you guys get the neat little graphic to popup instead of basic text?

  • Ezra Fishman

    Always on the lookout for ways to improve the Turnstile feature, while also trying to keep it simple to use. Opt in boxes and more fields are high on the list.

  • http://demandleap.com/ Rob Trube

    That would be nice, FO SHO! (that was a weak attempt at a hip For Sure…)

  • Allison

    Hmm…using Firefox, mine shows basic “Follow me” text, but it shows the graphic on IE9 and Chrome. Weird!

  • http://twitter.com/MaxSchnur Max Schnur

    Hey Edwin! Can you tell me if you’re on a desktop, iOS, or Android? There are certain circumstances where we couldn’t make it overlay on the video, which is why we added a Post-Roll Recap option (which is always on for iOS).

  • http://twitter.com/DunnAlexander Alexander Dunn

    thanks for the new features!

  • http://stopdoingnothing.com Patrick Allmond

    I don’t see this option in my video, and I don’t even have a mid-roll section of options?

  • http://jeffvincent.posterous.com/ Jeff Vincent

    you are hot on our tails! we are tracking this as well, I’ll be happy to share it later :)

  • Alyce

    Hi Patrick, to access this functionality, you need to go through the Twitter Follow Lab and paste your code there: http://wistia.com/labs/twitter-follows Hope that helps!

  • Chris Yaw

    Great add guys! Love it – when I installed it in my vid, though, the cool twitter banner and fonts didn’t make it, just a goofy blue font w/o a bkgd – am I the only one?

  • http://twitter.com/MaxSchnur Max Schnur

    Hey Allison, we’ve seen this sporadically in various browsers, and I think it’s related to the load speed of one of Twitter’s important scripts. We’re working on a way to make it consistently fast! Thanks for the report. :)

  • http://twitter.com/MaxSchnur Max Schnur

    Hey Chris, I think this has to do with the load speed of one of Twitter’s scripts. We’re trying to make it consistently fast right now! :)

  • http://twitter.com/ryankoral Ryan Koral

    killin me. what else is there?!? so great, guys!!!!

  • http://afroniquelyyou.com/ afroniquely | shae

    Can we say AWESOME?! You guys at Wistia forever bringing new and great stuff! It’s appreciated :)

  • Chris

    Guys, I don’t see any twitter follow buttons. I am using Chrome Version 24.0.1312.57 m on Windows 7 Ultimate.

  • Stuart

    This doesn’t appear to work when the video is playing full screen?

  • sebastian

    i have android galaxy note with firefox(chrome not exist for this version)

  • http://twitter.com/joomlajob joomlajob

    Guys we love u! Greetings from Germany!

  • http://www.yourBusinessChannel.com James Kirk

    Great stuff guys – this is an exciting update for our clients

  • http://twitter.com/MaxSchnur Max Schnur

    Hey Chris. It’s looking good to me on Win7 Ultimate with Chrome. Were you viewing fullscreen? That’s a limitation currently. (But hopefully not for too long!)

  • http://twitter.com/MaxSchnur Max Schnur

    You are correct, Stewart. For now, it doesn’t work fullscreen. That’s why we’re providing the Post-Roll Recap option.

    But in the not-so-distant future, fullscreen mid-rolls should be possible. We’ve got plans. ;)

  • http://jennyrain.com/ JennyRain

    Just yet another reason why we use Wistia @tag_consulting :)

  • http://www.facebook.com/christian.housh Christian Housh

    If a someone clicks the twitter button, in the stats for the video, will the IP address be appended with their twitter hashtag? That would be nice to help differentiate between otherwise anonymous viewer.

  • Allison

    Good deal, I’ll keep an eye out. Thanks for the response! You guys rock.

  • Allison

    I’m sure you guys are on it, but it would be really-super-duper cool to have the option of keeping your original post-roll call-to-action, even if you do choose to use this sweet Twitter feature. Just sayin! :)

  • http://twitter.com/MaxSchnur Max Schnur

    Hey Sebastian, don’t want to leave you hanging for too long! Android devices will, for the most part, have the same limitation as iphones–we can’t overlay the Follow buttons while the video is playing, so they should show up at the end in a post-roll. If you’re not seeing a post-roll with some Follow buttons, definitely hit up support-at-wistia.com!

  • http://brendanschwartz.com/ Brendan Schwartz

    That’s a really good idea. You can keep your original post-roll if you don’t fill out the “Post-Roll” section in the Twitter Follow Lab. The only exception is on iPhones we do force the post-roll recap at the end. Perhaps we should have an option to keep your original post-roll for iPhone though.

  • http://brendanschwartz.com/ Brendan Schwartz

    That would be amazing, unfortunately Twitter doesn’t give out access to people’s handles for privacy reasons.

    What we could do though would be to track the number of follows each person or company gets as a result of the video. Or we could mark individual heatmaps with the follow conversion event. We’ll definitely keep this in mind. We have some plans to integrate more conversion tracking into the application later this year.

  • Paul Newman

    Great update! This may have been covered, but any chance you guys are working on something similar for liking Facebook? I could see some value in both as far as email campaigns are concerned. Or something like the turnstile but for social shares? “Like us on Facebook to play”.

  • Alyce

    Cool suggestion, we’ll keep this in mind :)