What is YouTube? YouTube is an online video sharing web site that allows users to share videos with ease. It displays a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging (diaries and commentary) and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although companies and brands have created their own presence and upload their own content as well. Over 24 hours of video is uploaded every minute on YouTube (Official YouTube Blog, 2010). A brand or business can create a YouTube Channel to share video content and provide value to their current and potential customers. This content has the ability to spread virally and create brand awareness. However, you do not have to create and upload much content to have an active social experience on YouTube. You can provide value by:
- Commenting on videos and other channels related to your market and industry
- Sharing videos that your subscribers will find value in and appreciate
- Creating Playlists of your favorite YouTube videos that can be shared on your channel
Using YouTube vs Traditional Website Hosted Videos. The difference here is that you can either upload a video to YouTube and use it on your website or YouTube channel, or upload a video to your website and use the website’s built in video feature.
Traditionally, a more ‘professional’ approach would be to directly upload the video onto your website. However, there is tremendous upside to upload your video through YouTube first, then embed the video to your site:
- Ease of Use. Uploading is easy and video can be in a variety of formats. Videos can be up to 2GB in size and 15 minutes in length. In most cases, this is plenty. The whole process takes a few minutes; videos will be encoded automatically and available online almost immediately.
- YouTube Traffic. Attract organic YouTube traffic (YouTube viewers who discover your video on their own).
- Recognizable Link. You can easily recognize that a URL is a video. With Facebook, Twitter or any other social media distribution, all you need to do is copy and paste the URL of your YouTube video, and your video is distributed to your network. Your followers will know that your tweet, or post, is an explicit video viewing invite.
- Video Quality. A viewer can choose which play back quality they want to watch. Folks with slower computers can now watch a high quality video at standard definition to eliminate choppiness.
- Customizable. When you choose to embed your video on your site, you can select a few options, the most obvious being the dimensions of the video. There are more customization options as well such as Autoplay, Loop, Start, Border, Full screen, HD playback and more.
- Free Hosting. Videos use up a lot of server space and can quickly eat up bandwidth. You can avoid these costs and easily offload the work onto YouTube for free. The only limitations are the 2GB size and 15 minute length limits.
- Browser Compatibility. YouTube will allow videos to work properly in all browsers.
- Website Traffic. When you are an active YouTube user, you generate interest in your channel, and this can generate traffic to your website (if you include links in your channel and video descriptions to your website). Having YouTube as part of your social marketing strategy is valuable, and also serves as a very important source of website traffic.
Understand Your Video’s Effectiveness
One of the challenges with social media is in measuring the effectiveness of your social activity. Understanding how your market responds to your content can help provide relevant content to grow business and brand awareness. Besides getting feedback from video ratings and user comments, YouTube provides insight statistics and data:
- Insight: YouTube’s reporting function helps you understand views, viewer demographics, popularity, and community.
- Community: The community tab of Insight reports on how other YouTube users are interacting with your video contents in the form of rating, comments, and favoriting. Used properly, this information can drive future content you publish, making it more relevant and targeted.
- Hot Spots: The Hot Spots feature is available on a per video basis, and helps you understand the attention your video has at any point, compared to videos of similar length. Learn where you are losing interest, and make appropriate adjustments in future videos.
What can Revolve do? If you’ve ever considered having an active YouTube account, but are concerned with the time it takes to make videos, the newer YouTube social features of commenting, rating, favoriting, and sharing means you can get started right away without creating your own videos. When you do start producing videos not only can you build rapport with your market by offering valuable information, but you can drive more qualified traffic to your site, while tracking the effectiveness of videos with YouTube Insights. Utilized in this way, YouTube should be an integral part of any small business social marketing strategy, and Revolve can help you do it right.
Sources:
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/
http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/05/5-reasons-youtube-social-marketing-strategy.html
http://uvstudio.ca/blog/?p=1
http://www.pokeraffiliatesolutions.com/poker-affiliate-blog/mark_s/373-5-reasons-use-youtube-host-videos.html
http://www.mirnabard.com/2009/10/3-reasons-big-companies-use-youtube/
