First off, I want to express a warm thank you to Steve & Ernest for inviting me to participate in edSocialMedia. Adoption of social media is becoming an increasingly important component of school communications and I’m thrilled to share my thoughts & ideas with the edSocMedia community.

My first post aims to jump start a conversation about using video in your social media outreach- that will likely carry over to Thursday’s bootcamp at Montclair Kimerbley Academy — by focusing on a question that I kicked around when I decided to feature video on AdmissionsQuest: Youtube, Vimeo or both?

Initially I saddled up with Youtube- its sheer size (70,000,000 videos hosted on Youtube as of March 08; 200k publishers), cost (not a dime!) and devoted audience made setting up a channel a no brainer. The best part? Folks found my channel within a few hours of my first upload making me an instant member of the Youtube universe.

A few weeks later I set up shop on Vimeo by claiming a boarding school channel and uploading my first set of videos. The channel enjoyed fewer views than its Youtube counterpart, but the video quality made up for a lack of eyeballs (more on that later). I eventually upgraded to their pro option for a small annual fee ($50 per year) and saw an even greater bump in quality.

Checkout the same video hosted on both services for comparison purposes:

From a quality standpoint, I find the colors in the Youtube video less crisp than the Vimeo example. It seems more washed out than my Vimeo hosted video- something I’ve noticed consistently whenever I compare my work across the two services (even when I wasn’t a paid Vimeo member).

From what I understand, It has something to do with Vimeo’s conversion process, but I’m the first to admit that I don’t really get the mechanics. All I know is that I like the way it looks on the screen.

My  testing led me to favor Vimeo, but I ultimately decided to maintain channels on both sites. Why? It boiled down to two reasons.

1. Access
   Youtube’s massive audience (i.e. millions of viewers) makes going to where the party is a must. It’s hard to ignore the fact that millions of videos are viewed each month on their site. I wanted a piece of the action too.
2. Quality
   Vimeo, on the other hand, gives me the quality that I need for embedding videos on my site. An important point considering that a good percentage of my video views come from people visiting my site.

So here’s the rule for AQ… anytime I publish a video it goes to both communities. Youtube for eyeballs; Vimeo for its outstanding quality and embedding flexibility.

Yes, uploading to two sites is a bit more work, but the benefits are worth the small investment of time.

Peter Baron

Peter Baron is the Chief Evangelist at WhippleHill Communications, the founder of AdmissionsQuest, and a partner at edSocialMedia. Peter regularly blogs about school communication for WhippleHill and edSocialMedia. You can find him on Google+ and Twitter.