Social Media Spotlight: YouTube
This video platform is a great place to market your business. But YouTube can also be intimidating if you aren’t familiar with the platform. And let’s face it – creating and editing videos can take a TON of time. So to help you achieve success, we’ve put together a quick guide to help your business make the most out of YouTube.
YouTube was first launched in 2005. Founded by Jawed Karim, Steve Chen, and Chad Hurley, these PayPal employees realized that there wasn’t one central location for hosting and sharing videos. So, they created it. The first video was uploaded in April 2005 by Karim—a video titled “Me at the Zoo” — and YouTube officially launched in December 2005. Less than a year later, Google acquired the company for around $1.65 billion! The site continued to grow, and in 2007, YouTube was launched in the UK as well as eight other countries. Additionally, advertisements were rolled out. By 2009, YouTube had one billion video views per day, and a partnership with Channel 4 allowed YouTube to show TV content. YouTube has only continued to grow since then. With continuous improvements, including live streaming and changes to their ad system, YouTube is one of the biggest platforms on the Internet! As of 2020, YouTube regularly has over 2 billion logged-in monthly users!
YouTube is primarily a video platform. Individuals can subscribe to channels run by individuals or companies. They can then view new videos uploaded by the channels that they subscribed to on the Subscriptions tab in their home page. They can also sign up to receive notifications, which will let them know when a channel uploads a new video. Users engage with videos by liking, commenting, and subscribing to channels. Videos that are more popular are then recommended to other users on their home page. Trending videos are showcased in a Trending tab, making it easy for users to view videos that are trending in their location and worldwide. YouTube’s algorithm promotes video content based off of a user’s history, making it easy for users to find content that appeals to them. In fact, 70% of what people watch on YouTube is determined by its recommendation algorithm!
To market yourself of business on YouTube effectively means understanding YouTube’s algorithm. With so much content, it is important to produce quality content on YouTube. As a video hosting platform, it’s good to upload videos to YouTube and then link to them on your other social media platforms. But don’t worry if your videos are long! YouTube offers several tools to help share specific information in your videos more effectively. Users can generate a link to a specific time-stamp in a video by right-clicking a paused video and selecting “Copy video URL at current time.” Additionally, YouTube video creators can generate “chapters” in their videos, dividing their videos into shorter segments that a watcher can jump to.
Keywords are also an important part of success on YouTube. Keywords can be added to each video, something you should definitely take advantage of! You should use both Google and YouTube to research title and content ideas for your next video. You can use a browser extension like Keywords Everywhere or tap into Google’s rich resources available within Google Keyword Planner to find the right keywords to use with your video based on your topic and title.
Additionally, YouTube offers detailed analytic tools to help you understand your audience. Determining the time your audience watches your content and your demographics can help you market your content more effectively. YouTube allows creators to schedule their videos to upload at a specific time, making it easier to reach your audience. With the ability to add a custom thumbnail, organize videos into playlists, and add translations and subtitles to your videos, YouTube offers many tools to help users become engaged with your content. Be sure to add a catchy title to your videos, and upload an engaging thumbnail to encourage people to click on your videos. Group relevant videos into playlists to make it easy for people to find your content. And, add translations and subtitles to make it easy for users to access the specific content in your video. With these built-in tools that YouTube offers, you can make it easier to reach out to your audience and grow your platform.
Social media is becoming more important for marketing, and YouTube is one of the most popular platforms out there. Have any questions or issues with YouTube? If you have a small business or personal brand and need help navigating YouTube or any other social media platform, reach out to us! We would love to help!