YouTube is not to be ignored; it’s now the second largest search engine after Google. It’s easy to see why YouTube has been so successful, think about it – many people would rather learn about something by seeing it rather than by reading about it. Watching a video seems like infinitely less work than reading an article. Beware though, people have short attention spans. Your videos should be maximum 3 minutes long or risk losing viewers halfway through the video. Here’s why you should get over your fear of the camera (or enlist an employee):
Free
Like most social media tools, creating a YouTube channel is free. All you need is a gmail account and you can create a channel and start uploading videos.
Advertising
If you feel Google Adwords and Facebook Ads are getting too expensive for your budget, or you’d like to broaden your advertising reach, YouTube offers paid advertising and is generally less expensive than both Google and Facebook. With YouTube, there’s two types of advertising, 1. Within YouTube search, you can bid on the keywords you feel users would enter into the search bar to find your video. When users search these keywords, a thumbnail and description of your video appears in the results. 2. Promoted Videos run on the right hand side of a YouTube page (similar to paid advertising with Google), and can be set up through Google Adwords.
SEO
Google owns YouTube, they’re bound to put an emphasis on video in the organic search results if an applicable video is available online. Try a search yourself, there’s a good chance you’ll find relevant videos in your results. To take full advantage of the SEO benefits of video, remember to tag your videos with relevant keywords and terms you think people would use to find your video online.
Viral
Make a video funny or creative enough to catch the eye of the online world (no pressure!), and it could go viral; resulting in your video being seen by thousands of people. The exposure for your brand is priceless.
Demonstrate Expertise
Informational videos about your industry, or videos showcasing why you offer your customers a superior product, are a great way to showcase your knowledge online. Giving away great tips online gives potential clients a teaser of how good you are at what you do, and can translate into them contacting you for more information.
Humanize Your Business
The stuffy, corporate business model is out. People want to get to know the people behind a brand, and a great way to do that is through video. If you’re camera shy, find someone within your company that isn’t. Or, if you’re a one person show, you can post a powerpoint or slideshow video and narrate it as you go. And, don’t be afraid to show off your personality!
Measure your effectiveness
One of the challenges of marketing offline is the difficulty in measuring the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. If you put up a billboard downtown, it’s difficult to tell how many customers you acquired because of it. With YouTube, you have access to Insight reporting which quantifies views, demographics, popularity, and the community surrounding your YouTube presence.
Website traffic
The end goal of social media is driving traffic back to your website and to convert fans of your online content into customers and clients. When you’re active on YouTube and posting videos, commenting and rating others’ videos, sharing, etc, you generate interest in your channel. If you’ve included links to your website in your channel and the description sections of your videos, you can drive traffic to your website and increase your chances of making a sale.
Need help setting up a YouTube Channel for your business? We’re great at it! Contact us for more information.
The following is a blog post written by Lauren Bacon, a partner of Raised Eyebrow Web Studio. With her permission, we’ve reprinted it on our blog. If you’d like to see the original, click here.
If you’re a registered nonprofit and you’re not using Google’s Grants program, you might want to get on board. I’ve got lots to say about the benefits of this program, but let’s start with these two very appealing benefits:
Free Google Ads worth up to $10,000 per month.
A designated “nonprofit” channel on YouTube, also free.
For a long time, these benefits have been available to U.S.-based charities but not up here in Canada. That’s changed, and Canadian nonprofits are eligible too.
If this is enough to convince you, and you’re ready to go apply right this instant, I won’t stop you – here’s the link to the application form. But if you want more details first, read on.
Let’s start with the free advertising. Google sells the text-based ads that appear alongside their search results (brand name: AdWords) via an auction-like system: you select the keywords you want to advertise on (e.g. if you’re Covenant House Vancouver, you might want to show up on search results pages for searches like “homeless youth”, “homelessness Vancouver”, “at-risk youth Vancouver”, and so on), and you tell Google how much you’re willing to pay per click – perhaps 5 cents, maybe a dollar, maybe more. The more you’re willing to spend, the more likely it is that your ad will appear at (or near) the top of the ads, and on the first page of search results.
There’s an art to choosing the right keywords, of course, and Google has some tools to help you here. You’ll benefit greatly from taking a trial-and-error approach, and by crafting the text of your ad very carefully to be a) relevant to the search results on which it appears and b) enticing enough to attract traffic.
In any case, the premise of the Google Grants program (more details here) is that they will allow you to bid up to $1.00 per click, and they won’t charge you a penny – and you can “spend” up to $10,000 a month for your free ads. It’s a great deal, with no financial risk to you that I can see. (If you know of any, please leave them in the comments.)
OK, on to benefit #2: your own branded “channel” page on YouTube. YouTube (which is owned by Google) has their own nonprofit program aimed at helping charitable organizations improve their reach & support online activism and fundraising. The primary benefits of their program are:
Your own “channel” page (like this one from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives), which can be branded to coordinate with your other online communications channels.
The option to drive fundraising through a Google Checkout “Donate” button (this isn’t for everyone, as you may have your own online donation software you want to use to ensure that your contacts are kept in one place);
And perhaps most interestingly, they provide you with the option to add a call-to-action overlay on your videos, to drive traffic to your online campaigns.
If you’re using YouTube at all, this is well worth pursing. Full details on the YouTube Nonprofit Program are available here. And you can apply with the same Google for Nonprofits account you use for AdWords.
Many businesses would like to have a strong social media presence, but are put off by the sheer number of social networks available. It’s easy to get overwhelmed but remember, you don’t have to be on all social networking sites. In fact, being on sites that don’t directly speak to your target audience, or on sites that your target audience doesn’t frequently visit, can be detrimental to your business, and a waste of your valuable time.
A good place to start when entering the realm of social media is with the heavy hitters; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for video content, and your business blog. If this list still seems overwhelming, don’t despair! There’s a way to connect all these social networking sites so you’re not spending half your day posting the same YouTube link to all your different followers.
It is best to set up Facebook as your hub when connecting all your different social networking sites. This is because Facebook has a huge amount of applications that have been developed for all sorts of social networking related purposes. All you have to do is go to the Facebook Application Directory and search for the appropriate application, chances are it’s there in the directory. Next up, how to connect your blog, Twitter, and Youtube accounts to Facebook.
Blog:
Connecting your blog to Facebook means that each time you update your blog it automatically posts to your Facebook page’s wall, as well as archiving in the ‘notes’ tab of your page. The process for linking your blog isn’t obvious when looking at your Facebook page, but it’s well worth the search. To begin, click on ‘edit’ below your page’s profile picture. Next, click on ‘Apps’ in the list on the left hand side of the screen. Once there, find the Notes application and click ‘Go to App’. Now, on the left hand side of the screen you should see ‘Edit import settings’ as the very last option. Click this. You should now see a screen that looks like the photo below.
From here, enter the url of your blog and click ‘start importing’. Your blog is now auto posting to your Facebook page.
Twitter:
To connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts, log into your business’ Twitter account, then open a separate tab and go here. Find your business page, click ‘link to Twitter’ and follow the directions.
Youtube:
Using the Cueler application, you can connect your Youtube and Facebook accounts so that videos posted to your Youtube channel automatically post to your Facebook page as well. To do this, click here, and then click ‘install’. This will bring you to a screen that looks like this:
Choose the page you want to add the application to, and follow the directions to automatically post Youtube videos to a new Youtube tab on your Facebook page.
Following the above steps will help reduce the amount of time it takes to update your social media accounts. However, don’t forget to manually update your accounts as well. A mix of manual updates and auto posting allows you to save time, but also ensure that your business maintains a humanistic and approachable presence online. Also, if people follow your business across multiple social networking channels, taking the time to manually post, along with auto posting, ensures they won’t continuously see the exact same content numerous times.
We can help:
If you are interested in connecting your social media accounts and are looking for more guidance, contact us at Out-Smarts Marketing – we provide social media and internet marketing planning services to help you achieve your online goals.
More and more companies and entrepreneurs are using video to help them promote their products and services online, to build buzz and drive traffic to their sites and rightly so: posting videos can be a great way to build your online exposure.
However, many of the videos out there are of extremely poor quality – blurred images, poor sound quality, that omnipresent “Flip arm” and the list goes on – they are just not pleasant to watch. You’ve got to ask what these say about the company posting the content.
In the most excellent social media marketing handbook, Friends with Benefits, Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo point out, in reference to video popularity, that two factors don’t matter, one is quality, but I tend to disagree to some extent: I don’t know how often I have viewed videos by entrepreneurs on Facebook or YouTube that are so poor quality that they make me question whether I would actually want to do business with the company in question. Everything you do online should represent your brand. A video that is really poorly produced is simply going to reflect poorly on your brand. Its not necessarily all about how often your video is viewed but more importantly about the impact it has on your intended audience.
The challenge however, especially for entrepreneurs is to be able to upload good quality content without breaking the bank. Which leads me to introduce you to BBN3. SoMedia Networks is building Broadband Network Three (BBN3) websites in major cities across North America and then internationally to provide a platform and marketplace for a new class of user-generated video creators – the near-professional content producer. What this means is that you have an affordable alternative to the self made flip video.
Through a simple online interface, BBN3 allows you to work with them create and customize video projects easily and inexpensively. We worked with them in December – you may have seen my status updates about how much fun the shoot was – to put together a short intro to Out-Smarts. Other than the fact I look a bit like the incredible hulk (only smaller), I like the end result. Take a look and let me know what you think:
Thanks to Gina for allowing us to shoot in the Meridian Pacific boardroom.
Vancouverite, Josh Rimer is very active online, infact his goal is to become famous because of his online activities and he’s doing a great job of that. This week he shared on his blog a post discussing the benefits of commenting on YouTube. He has kindly allowed me to share it here – thanks Josh!
Reasons Why You Should Comment on YouTube Videos
Do you comment on YouTube videos very often? Well, you should. Contrary to what you might think, there are actually potential benefits to you for leaving comments which can help get you noticed. Here are a few:
Youre engaging the video producer when you comment on their video. If you leave a positive comment and something substantial (ie. more than just “cool video!â€) the video producer is more likely to notice you and respond back. The video creator may also click on your username to check out your channel and of course watch a video or two, and possibly even subscribe if they like your content.
When a video creator responds to your comment it also brings other peoples attention to that comment because the creator of the videos comments are highlighted and their reply is shown directly below and indented from your comment. Again, some people may click on your username to learn more about you and possibly watch some of your videos and even subscribe.
Comments can be searched on YouTube. People can go to www.youtube.com/comment_search and type in anything they want to search from YouTube comments in a similar way to how you can search for things being tweeted about on Twitter. So if your comment includes something being searched it could lead that person to click on you username, watch, and subscribe.
Your comments could be quoted outside of YouTube. Everything from blogs to magazines have quoted comments on YouTube videos. It even happened to me in a newspaper in Victoria, BC. I commented on how I couldnt get enough of a video that I thought was really hilarious and because the newspaper was doing a story on how funny that video was, they quoted me and included my name (you can click on the photo above to enlarge it and see).
YouTube is a community in a sense and interacting within that community is a great way to stand out and get noticed. Ive had famous YouTubers subscribe to my videos simply because I commented on theirs and Ive had other people find my YouTube videos through comments Ive written on other videos so its worked for me, and it can work for you too!
What do you think? Have any other reasons to share on why its beneficial to comment on YouTube videos?
ignored; it’s now the second largest search engine after Google. It’s easy to see why YouTube has been so successful, think about it – many people would rather learn about something by seeing it rather than by reading about it. Watching a video seems like infinitely less work than reading an article. Beware though, people have short attention spans. Your videos should be maximum 3 minutes long or risk losing viewers halfway through the video. Here’s why you should get over your fear of the camera (or enlist an employee):
