Small businesses often don’t appreciate all the benefits of online video–and especially YouTube–to their social media marketing. Here are some expert tips on how to use YouTube to your advantage.
Julie Perry is the social media director at BLASTmedia, a PR and social media firm that works with companies on their YouTube strategies. She recently shared some of her top tips on how you can get the most out of your YouTube channel.
1. Make sure that YouTube is part of your social media marketing.
“When I start talking to a potential client, the first words out of their mouth are always ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook.’ They’ll say, ‘We’ve heard we need to be there. We heard this is a place where we need to be.’
“I will say to them that for driving traffic and list building and leads for your business, putting content out on YouTube allows you to be discovered or found by people that are out searching for information. And if you’re creating video content–rather than hoard it on your own website where really no one is even going to find it–you can put it on YouTube where when it comes to online video destination sites, there are others out there that tend to be looked at as more professional, but YouTube has the vast majority of the market.
“Once you’re on the site, YouTube does a tremendous job of keeping its audience engaged. You’ll have the opportunity of coming up in related videos. If you sell, let’s say, an iPhone product and Steve Jobs has an announcement that he makes at some convention, and someone makes a video and uploads it to YouTube, you have the opportunity to perhaps come up next to that video. Let’s say he announces something for the new iPad and you have an iPad case or cover that your company makes. By playing with some of the tags and titles and things on YouTube from a search perspective, you have an opportunity to come up as a related video.”
2. Leverage the Reach of YouTube.
Perry says, “it really isn’t the younger generations that are just the ones hanging out on YouTube. One of the reasons for that is because of search. [Search] is where I think YouTube really has the power that people aren’t realizing. YouTube is now the #2 search engine.
“I’d say the other reason that it’s so powerful is the accessibility. You can now access YouTube videos from nearly every hot mobile device on the market, as well as now from your home television set. It’s accessibility. It’s providing content to your audience on their terms–how they want to watch it–not on your terms. Not by hiding it somewhere internally in your website where people have to dig to try to find it, but getting yourself out there, allowing people to watch you on their iPhone or their Android phone.
