Article from the Feb/March issue of Your Business Magazine.
It’s the second largest search engine in the world, so it should definitely be on your radar in 2015…
One of our services is flying off the shelves: SEO. All our clients are asking us to search engine optimise their websites so they rank in Google on page one. But YouTube doesn’t feature. I know what it’s like; when you don’t understand something you ignore it and hope it goes away. This is probably one reason why it is being ignored. Another is that few business owners realise the massive value that lies untapped in this visual online behemoth.
Stand up and take notice
People don’t read: People are reading less and less, and many would prefer to watch a short informative video than wade through pages of tiny text. Think about it, most websites consist of text and images, pretty poorly put together at that. Video basically gives your visitors a chance to ‘meet’ you face to face and engage with your brand without leaving their couch. This reduces their risk, reduces the time spent trawling through your site to find what they’re looking for and makes their lives easier.
People want to be entertained: If your brand adds value to your customers’ lives through entertainment or education, then YouTube is the perfect channel for you. Many people spend hours surfing YouTube for entertaining or interesting content and may very well be the first place your customers go to for ‘how to’ videos when they’re stuck with a task. Help people while away their time by engaging with your brand, nothing wrong with that.
Who owns YouTube? Another benefit to YouTube is that it will improve your search engine rankings (SEO) as it’s owned by Google. Google sees the number of people engaging with your brand across all your various channels, and the more customers that love your content, the higher you’ll rank on Google. Simple. Google is happy when your customers are engaged and spend a long time on your brand and rewards you by placing your website on page one.
Get more customers: YouTube is another channel to use to widen your footprint in the marketplace. It can help you to pick up followers who don’t know about your brand and to reach potential customers who ordinarily wouldn’t engage with you on your traditional channels. Subscribers to your channel eagerly await your next video instalment, so don’t leave them hanging!
Make money: By allowing advertising to be displayed on your YouTube channel, you also have the opportunity to make extra income on the side. Nice.
Take advantage of these trends and expose your business to thousands of potential new visitors every month.
YouTube statistics
1. More than one billion unique users visit YouTube each month.
2. YouTube is localised in 61 countries and across 61 languages.
3. 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
4. Over six billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube — that’s almost an hour for every person on earth, and 50% more than last year.
5. Millions of subscriptions happen each day — the number of people subscribing daily is up more than three times since last year, and the number of daily subscriptions is up more than four times since last year.
How to get started
By now you’ve realised that you need to use YouTube, but where should you start? Here are a few tips:
► Create a channel: It’s easy enough and there are easy-to-understand instructions available on the YouTube homepage. Within a few minutes you’ll have your own channel that you can dress up nicely in your branding and link to your website and social media. You will need a Gmail account.
► Create videos: Create your own original videos and start uploading. You can approach an agency to create a full blown TV production quality video or something simpler. Or you can simply pick up your smartphone, take a video and upload it to YouTube yourself, for free. Download YouTube Capture onto your phone or tablet from the app store and it’s even easier. Load the video onto your website’s home page, thus making your website more engaging and increasing sales conversions (up to 133%) from your website.
► Become a curator: Google wants you to help sort out the billions of videos that people have loaded online. They are begging you to act as a librarian for them and cherry pick the videos you like the most, add them to your channel and share them with your subscriber base. Think of yourself as a curator in an art gallery. You didn’t paint any of the artworks yourself; you just found them and are displaying them for people with similar taste. It’s the same with your channel. Don’t limit yourself to only unique content unless you have a lot of time or money to spend generating new content. Find great content and build a valuable, engaging platform for your followers. More followers equals more sales or at least more revenue from advertising on your channel.
► Go viral: The holy grail of YouTube videos is one that goes viral. This is what everyone aspires to achieve, but few achieve. You want your video to resonate with viewers to encourage them to share.
► Create an advert for YouTube: Why pay millions of rands or dollars to show your advert to viewers who are going to fast forward it in order to get to their TV programme? Rather create an advert on YouTube and share it with your subscribers and other social media channels and let the web work its magic.
Are you seeing the value yet? I hope so. Now get out there and create your first video.
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