The web universe is constructed with a lot of tools to share material on. From the favourite social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, then of course there’s the tools with more opportunity to create innovative content, for example Vimeo, Vine and YouTube. Of these three, YouTube is the one that the general population are most likely to be up to date with. You might be thinking right now what this has to do with marketing, YouTube has a reputation for endless quantities of inexperienced content, but can it not be a useful marketing instrument as well?
In additional posts you might have read you’ll have seen I’ve talked about the benefits of viral videos and how larger businesses are using them to market their own products. What we’re inclined to neglect is that in order for these videos to be a triumph, they need a prominent video platform. Bonjour YouTube. The advantages of YouTube are endless, though you might not know it, there’s more to it than just being free and easy… which in itself is pretty smashing, all things considered.
YouTube focusses largely on how your video content is viewed on other online platforms. When you upload a video, you have the option to share it in at least ten different forms. The most common of these would be Facebook, Twitter, Google+… but then there’s others: Bebo, Tumblr, Reddit, Pinterest and Odnoklassniki (which, going off my five Russian lessons, is Russian – but that’s as much light as I can shed) are all on the extensive list. The analytical features on YouTube are incredibly clear and beneficial as well as allowing you to see whether you are targeting the right demographic. It is carefully assessed by age, gender, location as well as other means of analysis and is formatted in nice graphs so you can see where and who your video reaching – and be very smug when Madagascar is highlighted on the map feature, as unlikely as that is.
You might not know it, but Google has suspiciously close ties with YouTube… as a result YouTube often ranks highly in Google web results. I recently found out that YouTube is also the second largest search engine, so when you’re wandering in and out of web domains searching for the benefits of YouTube, like me, you might stumble across this video blog from Lambda Films, a Norwich online production company. It lists a few useful pros and cons when it comes to YouTube.
The video details how a ‘well optimised’ YouTube vid might appear above the web results in the Google ranks. This happens when Google selects it as quality content that contends with the other web results. In order for this to occur your video has to be well optimised though, and fortunately YouTube has a feature to tag the video with relevant subjects, so get tagging.
Though it’s free, it does not in any way suggest YouTube is not professional. In fact, it has the potential to genuinely give your business a boost… so I’d advise using YouTube to any online marketer.
Want to find out more about online video marketing, then visit this marketing blog.
