When we talk about social media we immediately think of Facebook, Twitter and even Myspace, but often overlook the video option of YouTube. Founded in February 2005, YouTube is the leader in online video, and the premier destination to watch and share original videos worldwide. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips through its website and across the internet through other sites, mobile devices, blogs, and email.
The search engine optimization industry frequently talks about YouTube in terms of a social network. This can be confusing for the outside observer, particularly when YouTube is being talked about by their own search engine optimization agency.
There are solid reasons for classifying the video sharing site as a social network, and these relate back to your SEO plan. First, though, let’s look at the more confusing aspects: YouTube as a search engine, and YouTube as a tool. YouTube first gained popularity with businesses as a tool, because it enabled easy posting of video. People began to think of it as a ‘video search engine’ because they were able to hear about a video from a someone, then look it up easily.
This last part should provide a hint as to YouTube’s social aspects. Not only are videos talked about around the internet, they draw comments on the site itself. Users can follow their favourite video creators, and accounts can be used to distribute information.
Obviously, YouTube is all of the above, but it’s important to understand how your use of the site will affect your social media management and search engine optimization plans. In creating content on YouTube that attracts your target audience, the site gives you the ability to build up a visible following. This, above all, makes it valuable for your social media marketing, and leads back to your SEO. Also, as Google now owns YouTube, its content is included in Google’s search results.
When it comes to marketing, video can be a great way to interact with potential customers, but you must do it correctly in order to attract new customers and not chase them away. They must see your video as providing them with interaction as well as value in order to be an effective means of social media marketing. And with recent social features, YouTube is quickly positioning itself as the respected social site for small business.
One of the challenges with social media sites, is the difficulty in measuring the effectiveness of your social activity. Understanding how your market responds to your content can help small business video publishers provide relevant content to grow their business and increase sales. YouTube also introduced brand channels for companies to set up their own page that is branded by you and houses your videos. This is the YouTube concept of advertising and marketing.
The fact is that YouTube is another effective way to utilize social media marketing and the cost are minimal if any at all. If you can create videos that share value and interaction with your consumers, you can post those videos to an audience of millions of users. What you must remember is that your video will be one of 150,000 that are uploaded daily, so make it worth the time for users to view it. You also want to keep in mind that users 18 to 34 years of age frequently share videos with their family and friends, so there is a viral effect to be had here as well.
As with any social media marketing strategies be creative, have fun but most of all do it - because your competitors probably are.
The Effective Ways
About 40 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. There are a lot of competition for those viewers. To get an advantage in the competition, a few things are to consider to maximize your YouTube marketing results.
Compelling Videos: Create content that addresses your audience’s needs. Your goal should be to create videos that are helpful, valuable and compelling to your prospects and clients. If you can blog about it, you can create a video about it. Your video content may consist of how-to’s, answers to frequently asked questions, expert interviews, screen video captures, slide shows and more.
Findable: Your videos should be findable both within and outside of YouTube. Videos often appear on the first page of search engines, and are a proven method of leap-frogging your competition to the top of the search results page. The fact that Google owns YouTube can’t be overlooked. Things to make your videos gets to the targeted customers is to make sure you fiddle well with the "Title", "Description" "Category" and "Tags".
Branding: Consider your YouTube channel your “home away from home.” In other words, you can turn your channel into a destination. You can create custom background to match your branding, choosing "Player View" and creating playlists.
Annotations: You can add annotations to your YouTube videos that include clickable calls to action. These annotations appear on top of your videos for a specified length of time and can include links to other videos, playlists or channels, or include a subscribe option. This is also helpful if you have created a video with out-of-date information.
Post a bulletin: You can create a bulletin and a link to a video that will appear on your subscribers’ and friends’ home pages. This is a great way to draw extra attention—and traffic—to your video.
YouTube ads: People are coming to YouTube and directly entering in search queries of what they’re looking for. You can bid on those keywords just as you would Google pay-per-click. But instead of a text ad coming up on the right-hand side as it does on Google, you get a video and a thumbnail of a video.
Other Social Media: Extend the reach of your video and make it more shareable. Post your video to social media sites to target more audience and more wider community.