Vimeo Central is home to all the valuable video content your company creates, centralizing your video comms, meetings, training, works-in-progress, and archives. That means every team can access the content they need at any time — no late night pings for permissions granted required.
The trick to a successful Video Library? Ruthless organization.
If you’re not well-organized, all this interconnectivity can have drawbacks…because no one wants to dig for a video file for a half hour. It’s not a great use of company time (or company dime). And since every company’s goals, workflow, and internal organization are drastically different, there is no one-size-fits-all setup.
To make spring cleaning your video library easy-peasy, we’ve got a few classic Marie Kondo tips that’ll make organizing your company’s collateral ultra-efficient. Cherry-pick any of these best practices and you’ll be well on your way to a better Video Library experience for the entire team.
Ready?
1. Know your roles
You can easily separate your team members into specific roles, like:
- Contributors will create content
- Viewers will watch and review content
Understanding roles within Vimeo will make your Video Library easier to use and provide an added layer of security. For instance, you can make recorded Town Halls available to everyone while keeping internal project folders limited to specific groups or contributors.
Knowing exactly what content will live in your library helps you set up folders and subfolders that are intuitive for your team.
Before making your folders, create a table or spreadsheet for the different types of content you’ll create. You’ll outline what teams or stakeholders are responsible for the content, who the contributors are, who needs access, and how content relates to each other. Here’s an example:
| Content | Responsible | Contributes | Views | Related |
| Social ads (Work-in-progress) | Growth Marketing | Creative Team | All Marketing | Internal |
| Town Hall | Comms | Production Services | All Company | Internal |
| How-To video | Training | Production Services | Support | Public |
2. Simplify folder structures for quicker navigation
How you should structure the content in your Video Library is up to you.
Remember: content is why members come to the library. Since working memory for most people can hold between three and four items of information at any one time, you need to make sure your library isn’t overwhelming and assets are easy to find.
A good rule of thumb? Keep the top-level folders and the subfolders to nine or fewer.
3. Customize who sees what, securely
Using Single Sign-On (SSO) makes logging into Vimeo quicker and more secure. User identities are centralized in your company’s cloud-hosted Identity Provider (IdP), like Azure or Okta.
SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) adds the ability to automatically provision and remove users based on when they join or leave the company, so team seats are up to date with your current employees.
Plus, SCIM lets you send over groups and automatically update, so instead of sharing content with 35 members individually; you can share with the entire “Marketing” group in one go.
4. Organize the way your company thinks
When it comes down to creating your folder structure, you’ll probably be between two choices: (1) organize by your company’s departments (2) or by the initiatives your teams work on. This decision is purely based on your preference, and it doesn’t have to be exclusively one or the other.
By Team
Setting your folder structure by team is an intuitive call, especially for brands focused on selling products. Here’s an example of how to structure your Video Library by team:
By Topic
Another way to organize your folder structure is by topic area, which is popular among service-based companies or institutions like those in healthcare, non-profits, schools, places of worship or financial institutions.
5. Give specific folders a job
Once top-level folders are set, determining the subfolders should be the responsibility of a member closest to the content who can foresee alllllllll the use cases for the subfolders.
For instance, someone in marketing might determine marketing subfolders, but that someone should understand the entire department. Special Folder admin privileges can be assigned to contributors, allowing them to create subfolders within a designated folder. This will free up account admins from having to micromanage the library.
6. Add colorful flair to your folders
Even if you’re a pro at organizing your top-level folders, odds are you’ll still end up with a hefty library to navigate.
Assigning colors to folders can make parsing a library much easier. Folder settings allow you to give folders in your library colors that you can then coordinate based on the department or topic. For instance, all published videos could be blue while works-in-progress could be red. This makes a large library much more understandable at a glance.
7. Tag your videos to surface the right content faster
Organizing videos based on similarities sounds simple enough, but different videos overlap with different categories. Metadata tags can make similar content easier to find without duplicating files into multiple folders.
Although every video you add to the library includes a searchable transcription, hashtags (tags, for short) can add to discoverability by assigning types of words not covered in the transcriptions. To systematize the process, create a guide that members can reference as they’re tagging.
When adding tags, think about these three main types:
- Descriptive tags are the most common because they simply describe the video content. The people in the video, recording location, and usage rights are common descriptive tags.
- Administrative tags are technical file information like resolution or frame rate. It can also be information about the recording device, like using the tag “Zoom” for a Zoom meeting recording.
- Structural tags are the words that describe how the video is organized. In Vimeo, it is typically done using Chapter markers that identify sections of a video.
Some examples of good tags not usually included in transcriptions:
- Video type (Social Ad, Meeting, Internal Comms, Interview, How To)
- Client’s name
- Department name
- Work order
- Product name
- Location
- Version
8. Put high-priority content front and center
Featured videos
At the top of the Video Library homepage is the Featured Video area where you can present the content you want your entire team to watch.
Use it for the latest exec team town hall, recent product release videos, or just a place to brand your library and bring the company together.
Pro tip: Team owners and admins can set the featured video on the Video Library homepage by clicking the Featured Content button in the lower right corner of the featured video area.
Live events
Owners, Admins, and Contributor Plus members can organize live events into Video Library folders, (instead of keeping them within the live events page) so you can find recorded live events more quickly.
This allows you to stream events and automatically save their recordings to folders where they will be easier to find by your entire team or just the Contributors and Viewers who have folder access.
9. Automate regulatory and legal compliance
Save time and energy worrying about legal compliance with Video Library’s data retention tool.
Maybe you have videos from weekly executive office hours that you want to be deleted after one month. Or, maybe there are historical company videos that should never be deleted.
Instead of manually manipulating each asset, Admins can set lifecycle policies for content. This is often done to comply with regulatory or legal rulings and general media management.
You can set the policies per folder, and if a video gets deleted accidentally, the history log lets you recover videos up to 30 days after they’re deleted.
10. Search titles, tags, and talking points
Search is a crucial part of any Video Library. You already know how you can search for tags on your video content but—let’s face it—we are all busy, and sometimes tags don’t get added. (We highly recommend it, though! It’s a few extra minutes of work per video for long term organizational payoff. 😎)
Instead, leverage Vimeo’s automatic video transcriptions to help you find exactly what you need. Each video in your Video Library gets transcribed, which means any spoken word or phrase can be easily searched. It’s the quickest way to find a video — if you know what to search for, that is.
Searching is simple:
- Enter the phrase/term you’re searching for
- Open the video at the exact time stamp where the word is spoken
- Or, click the “Results” page, where you can filter your findings by date, video title, or even the person who uploaded the video
Putting it all together
Okay, your turn! Pick a few of these ten and try them out.
You’ll see how an organized Video Library will improve team productivity, and tenfold the value everyone will get out of your video assets.
Welcome home, videos. Demo Vimeo Central today.
