- Arian Hill
The Power of Video: 3 Ways Brands Can Utilize YouTube
When a company or brand looks to the Internet to market themselves, social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram come to mind. Some brands, however, overlook the power of video, specifically the YouTube platform. For the past 11 years, YouTube has established itself as a leading digital marketplace where brands can interact with consumers and vice versa.
YouTube is the third most visited site in the world with almost five billion videos watched on YouTube every day. According to Fortune Lord statistics, eight out of ten 18-49 year-olds watch YouTube. Eighty percent of those live outside of the United States. Approximately 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute and 3.25 billion hours of video is watched a month. With these numbers in mind, why isn’t your brand on YouTube? How can brands utilize the platform effectively?
Here are three ways brands can maximize their visibility and experience with consumers through the YouTube platform:
Create meaningful, creative content.
One of the easiest ways a brand can be recognized is through a viral video. While it is hard to make something go viral, there are some key aspects of a viral video that need to be remembered during your video production. First and foremost, it does not need to be lengthy. In this day and age, attention spans are very low so keeping your users engaged is key. To keep users engaged, the content you create needs to be unique and creative. Try and think of “outside of the box” ideas to showcase your brand. Lastly, the content you create needs to meaningful to what your brand is doing. One of the hardest aspects of producing relevant content is staying up-to-date on recent trends that appear and disappear so quickly in our society. Being on top of trends and crafting your videos around those trends is essential to producing an effective video for your brand.
Consistency is key.
Brands that are most successful on YouTube consistently post and update their content. Creating quality video is certainly important but to be able to consistently post quality video is the real secret. Also, keep your branding the same throughout the videos. In other words, make sure your video is touching on the key objectives of your brand and it is clear that the video belongs to your brand. By keeping your channel updated with interesting videos about your brand, consumers are more likely to engage with the company.
Connect your YouTube to your other social media.
Facebook and Twitter are two outlets where video is shared the most. By adding YouTube into your social media strategy, your other social media outlets could also thrive. Video content is intriguing and much more shared than posts without visual content. By posting YouTube videos on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., you can improve the quality of your social networks and direct users to your YouTube channel for maximum viewing of all of your brand’s videos.
Viewing of videos on YouTube is steadily increasing and brands are coming up with more and more creative ways to market themselves. By producing video content for a brand, the brand becomes more intriguing and adds another way to interact with their consumers. If your brand hasn’t turned to YouTube as an outlet, the time is now.