When people are thinking about social media sites, there's a major one that often gets overlooked: YouTube. Honestly, it's not just about sharing cats and conspiracy theories. With over 4 billion videos viewed a day and at least 800 million unique users (their own numbers), YouTube has incredible outreach potential. If you make good use of it, YouTube can be a huge boon to your online marketing and outreach efforts.
Here are some tips for making the most of YouTube!
Create a Channel.
Much like other social sites, you can create an official channel that hosts all your videos, and that fans can subscribe to. This is a great way to make sure all your videos are easily accessed by anyone who wants to see them. This also makes it easier to host your videos on YouTube and link to them within your webpages.
Fill Out Your Profile
Don't forget to fully fill out your profile within the system. Besides being the source for actual information about you, a complete profile also gives a small boost to your search results. Don't forget to include links to your website and other social media efforts!
Keep it Short & Snappy
Internet users have notoriously short attention spans, and brief videos tend to get a lot more views than long ones. If you want to address a lot of questions, try breaking them up into a series of shorts sort of like video blogs, where you address one specific topic per video in 2-3 minutes. Even better, once you've got a number of these, you can use them to build a video FAQ of sorts.
Go Behind the Scenes
People still love learning how stuff works. Whatever industry you're in, think about making a series of shorts showing your manufacturing process or life around the office. Making your product interesting tends to make people more interested in your product itself. Shorts based on your staff can help humanize you, and make you seem less like a corporate facade.
Shoot to the Top
Since Google owns YouTube, YouTube can be a shortcut to the top of Google's search engine results screens. Generally, when someone runs a Google search, the top couple videos related to that search are displayed at the top of the list. Having a popular or well-liked YouTube video can instantly put you in front of a lot of searchers.
Go for Humor
With the exception of political content, nearly all YouTube videos that “go viral” are funny. While we won't say it's an absolute necessity, it certainly helps a lot in encouraging people to share your content. This is a good use for overlays as well. Meta-commentary on the video in popup text is popular among younger users, and helps demonstrate self-awareness.
Make Full Use of the Description Area
While a complete description is helpful, the description area can be used for quite a bit more. You can include more information on the products being shown, or even use it as extra advertising space, complete with custom links and social media referral buttons. It's also a good place to put your own links to related videos, rather than relying on YouTube's automated system to find them.
In short, YouTube is all about giving people entertainment value that's wedged into a 2-5 minute short. The more successful you are at that, the more people you'll have sharing your videos. If you get good at it, you can vastly increase your appeal and the number of viewers you're reaching with each video.
Just try not to get drawn into fights in the comments section.
Call DeepSky Marketing to find out how you can integrate YouTube and other Social Media into your online marketing efforts. DeepSky Marketing is a company that provides businesses with profitable marketing systems and verifiable return on investment (ROI). To schedule a brief no-cost consultation call 707 823-3888.
