300 hours of video a minute. 6 billion hours of video watch a month. 4 billion videos watched by users every day. 1 billion users. (According to YouTube statistics)
These figures show just why exactly your business should be on YouTube as another avenue of social media promotion for your business. In 2015, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and aside from Google no website is more viewed every month than YouTube. According to Jefferies, online video ads will be a $17 billion market in the US by 2017 and YouTube will grow from $5.9 billion in video ad sales this year to $8.9 billion in 2016.
All huge figures, all great for YouTube, but how can this positively affect your business?
In March 2015, according to Digiday, those aged 25-35, male and female, had a unique visitors count of over 40,000,000. This age range are those who watch YouTube more frequently and for longer periods, and the unique visitor figure decreases steadily until the 65+ category, having said that, there are still just under 20,000,000 unique visitors over 65 in March 2015. This shows no matter what your target audience is, you will have a market interested in your business, if your video is engaging.
(Graph from Digiday.com)
Before setting up your channel, it may be worth having a look around the site as to what kind of videos you wish to produce. See what is popular within your maket area, and how you can relate your products into these ‘trending’ categories. You can spend hours producing a great quality HD video, but if this is irrelevant to your consumers, it won’t be picked up online to be shared by friends- and won’t get you the views which you then would hope would convert to sales.
Once you have done your research, set up your channel and customise your page. When you have 500 subscribers and your channel is over 30 days old, you can set up your own custom URL which means you can have a easy to remember vanity URL which is more related to your channel and hopefully increase the amount of people finding you on the site.
Once you are set up, begin creating content! Remember the earlier figure I gave you- 300 minutes of video per minute. With such insane figures of content on YouTube, you need to make your video stand out- be original, creative, and fun!
If you are a business wanting to create an advert for your company, stay away from old tired ideas, and view some of the bigger brands ad campaigns, sometimes their content is unrelated at first to their product, however the slogan or message directly relates to their product. These adverts, such as the one shown below by Budweiser, are the ones that go viral and get people talking about them- who would have guessed a puppy and a horse having a friendship would promote a beer brand- however the ‘#bestbuds’ hashtag at the end of the video tied into the brand identity and gained over 58 million views for the company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQB7QRyF4p4
The success of this campain meant that Budweiser carried on with the characters in the first one, for more #bestbud adventures as the impish puppy runs away and needs his bud to help bring him home- the pup became so popular, it got its own social media account on twitter- Busweiser really maxed out the hype around their ad to their advantage!
According to Reelseo, 5% of videos on YouTube drive 95% of the views, showing how hard it is to get noticed on the platform, which is why it is important to do everything you can to get your video noticed- your SEO. Link everything back to your own site- make sure your page is branded so all your hard work can be linked back to your own site. If you have an engaging video that makes customers want your product, and no link to take them directly to your site to buy said product or service, this may decrease a customers likelihood to follow through with the purchase- you need to engage then convert a viewer! This will also increase your SEO which is imperative when maintaining a successful SEO strategy. As well as promoting your products or brand, SEO is the main reason big brands use a platform such as YouTube.
