How to use YouTube for Business
YouTube is the world's largest video sharing website. Visitors can search for and watch videos on nearly an unlimited number of subjects. Although most of the videos are user-generated, more and more professional videos are beginning to appear on the website. It's easy to publish a video on YouTube, just sign up and you're ready to go. If you think of the popular 90's show, America's Funniest Home Videos, you can quickly imagine what most of the content is like.
Thirteen hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. People are consuming video and lots of it. With users demanding more interaction and video making a huge push into the online world, YouTube is the first place that comes to people's mind. Roughly 1/3 of the American population is on YouTube due to the vast array of content. The likelihood that your target audience is on watching is very high. The reasons for getting your content on YouTube seem quite obvious.
Business Goals for YouTube
The types of video content are only bound by the creative nature of your marketing team- everything from product tutorials, comedy skits, commercials, and more. But, your business goals boil down to two things.
- Build brand awareness through the use of video
- Use YouTube's embedding script to easily add videos to your own website
How to Embed YouTube Videos on Your Website
There is much more that you can do with YouTube besides simply uploading videos. Probably one of the best features is being about to embed videos on your website. This allows you to have video on your site without having to worry about any of the technical knowhow or hosting headaches associated with video.
You aren't limited to only embedding your videos, you can also embed any video from YouTube on your site. Click here for step-by-step instructions on how to embed videos from YouTube on a HubSpot CMS page.
How to use YouTube
Commenting on Videos
Commenting on Videos can be an interesting strategy. This is really only valuable on videos that are about your industry and have tens of thousands of views, or more. With this volume of views, commenting will add to the conversation and can be just as valuable as engaging in a blogs comments.
Favoriting Videos
You don't have to produce video for you to create a list of your favorite videos to share with others on YouTube. Creating a favorite is an easy way to bookmark specific videos for later and also shows engagement in the YouTube community. Plus, if it's already been created, why recreate the wheel and do it yourself?
Sharing Videos
YouTube has an interesting feature where you can share a video on multiple social sites directly from the video page. Sharing videos is a great way to engage your community on other networks with your videos or videos that you favorite. Share options include email, Facebook, Digg, and others.
Creating Playlists
Also underneath videos is an option to create a playlist. If you produce multiple videos in a series, creating a playlist is a great way to tie them together. This is also a way to categorize favorites.
YouTube Insight
YouTube provides some analytics about videos that you have created. You can get here by visiting the video page, clicking on "Insight," or returning to the "My Videos" section and choosing "Insight" for the specific video. Insight is not of much value unless you have a video with thousands of views. This can tell you if a video has been embedded on any sites, although the only intuitive way to know the exact URL of the embedded video is to go to the video page and underneath the video click on "Statistics & Data."
By visiting your account page you can also click on the "Insight" button to get a full overview of all your videos. The overview of all your videos can help you understand which videos are performing best, some popularity data, and demographic data about your videos.
Video Promotion
Similar to buying television time, you can "Promote" your video from the "My Videos" section under each video. This works like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and allows you to buy traffic to your videos based on keywords that you choose to target. With the right kind of material this can be much cheaper than television advertising.
HD Video
YouTube recently began accepting HD video content (720p) on their site and you can upload this type of video as long as your video falls within the basic requirements (1GB size and 10 minutes in length). When a visitor is on your video page there is an option to "View in HD." Although it's not well documented, you can add &fmt=18 to the end of the video URL in the embed script or a link to a video for automatic HD viewing.
