YouTube’s own massive viewership is a compelling reason to be part of that online community. There are three main angles that make YouTube particularly appealing to businesses and organizations:
1. Virality:
Video is by far the most talked about and passed-around element of our modern digital life. When one catches on, whether it is as commonplace as a music video or as pivotal as an Iranian protester dying in the street, it can be seen by millions of people.
2. Search visibility:
“Universal search” is the now well-established trend at Google, Yahoo, and Bing to intersperse traditional Web pages with many other content types within search results. These new content types are blog posts and news items, images, local results (with maps), products aka “shopping results,” and videos. Search for just about anything, and you will see videos prominently displayed in the results set. If you’re not uploading videos (and titling them with phrases commonly used by searchers), you’re missing out on a source of traffic.
3. Inbound links:
The best practice is to upload your video to YouTube, to take advantage of the thriving traffic and high page rank of the site—as well as its hosting and bandwidth—and then to embed a copy of it on your own Web site. Assuming its any good, your video will serve as “link bait” among your target audience: Your customers and fans will link from their own blogs and other Web sites to your video page. Those external links will benefit your site’s authority in the eyes of the major search engines, thus improving your search rankings.
What kind of companies should be actively uploading videos to You-Tube? What content should you consider uploading?
Musicians, entertainers, comedians, TV shows, plays, movies, animation
studios, and sports teams and leagues
Anyone whose product is essentially video should be uploading trailers, highlights, and live concert footage. The entertainment industry still struggles with questions of intellectual property and how to be compensated for it, but it seems clearer and clearer that YouTube ’ s potential to popularize media and performers is worth the risk of hurting the market by giving away free material. After all, the average YouTube video is just two minutes long—and amazingly, the typical user doesn’t even sit through the whole thing, flitting from video to video every 3 minutes on average. If such a short fix satisfies the user ’ s need without stimulating her to go see the movie or buy the song from iTunes, how much have you really given up?
Television commercials
You’ve paid scads of money producing them—at least you can give them eternal life on the Internet. Your ad agency will have moved on to their next great idea, but consumers will still be out there in the thousands nostalgically clicking on ads of yore, rapping with Filet-O-Fish, watching the GoDaddy Girl suffer a wardrobe malfunction, or seeing VW ’ s German engineers “UnPimp your Auto.”
How-to videos
These needn’t’ have big budgets or fancy production values to be popular and effective. If you are in the outdoor gear market, cookware, tools, crafts, or any do-it-yourself market—as well as many business, technology, and software markets—you can probably envision several how-to topics that your audience would clamor for. Associating your company and products or services with these how-to videos, even if they are not actively being used or demonstrated on air, is a very positive move. Produce and upload a video assembly manual, instruction manual, or troubleshooting guide; the benefit for having such a resource available 24/7 on the public Web and easily found via search engines is a godsend. You generate good will and authoritative reputation in the eyes of your customers. You may also help them better use your products, turning potential customer-service headaches into happy customers and online praise.
Product demos
If you typically pitch your product or service by performing a demo, you probably have a worthwhile video in the making. Think about how you present your wares at a trade show or if your items sell in home-party settings.
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