Public Relations & Social Media Insight

More than 70 percent of B2C and B2B companies are investing in video marketing this year, and YouTube is fast-becoming the silver screen of the world wide web. It’s an essential network for getting in front of the right viewers.

Google’s video platform has seemingly endless reach, garnering more than 800 million unique visitors each month. At the same time, Americans are increasingly eager to subscribe to their favorite Channels so they don’t miss a single video. It’s important to have a video marketing strategy that powers consistent updates for eager viewers! There are a number of steps you can take to ensure your brand Channel is easily discovered and ridiculously engaging.

In our latest infographic, Brafton outlines the top 10 ways you can optimize your business YouTube Channel. Check out our related blog post and our video marketing white paper for more insights....

Online video can no longer be ignored. On the crowded commuter train many passengers have ditched their evening newspaper for YouTube on their phone. In my office when something goes wrong with the system our calm, twenty something intern sits back and watches a YouTube video to find a solution to the problem. 

YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine in the world behind the mighty Google itself. So there is no doubt that you, as a company, need a presence there. Here’s everything you need to know about YouTube for business to get started....

72 hours of video are uploaded onto the site every minute --- that's a lot of competition. Here's how to make your videos stand out.

With video a growing component of companies’ content strategies, building a YouTube brand page that stands out from the competition is increasingly important.

According to company statistics, there are more than 800 million unique visits to YouTube with 4 billions hours of video are watched each month. A whopping 72 hours of video are uploaded onto the site every minute — that’s a lot of competition.

With so much content available, owners of YouTube pages need to make sure that they give people a reason to visit.

Here are some tips on how to make a YouTube page attractive and worthy of people’s attention....

[Practical tips for social media strategists - JD]

YouTube newbies should check out The Small Business Guide to YouTube, a helpful microsite that shows a step-by-step guide for getting started with YouTube marketing.

Created by Simply Business, this one-page destination covers everything from creating good content to preventing legal issues. With so many instructions to read through on YouTube’s help board, this site speeds up the process by briefly summarizing all the FAQs on one page and then making detailed answers easy to find. The page is designed as a flow chart that takes you through a series of “yes” or “no” questions that lead to the answers, which are outlined in a slide show presentation.

It starts with the basics — “Do you know how to create a YouTube account?” — and moves into more complicated territory, like the various monetization options and how to measure your success in YouTube analytics. Every time you answer “no,” you’ll see a new slide that’s filled with checklists, videos, and links to articles to fill you in on what you don’t already know. (And who doesn’t love saying no?)...

YouTube video plays several key roles in the Customer Journey. The video platform offers customers a way to engage through comments and sharing content with one another and plays a supporting (sometimes starring) role in other social media campaigns by serving up videos for Twitter, Facebook andblogs.

While it is more obvious that these other Social Media Platforms steer the customer journey towards YouTube videos, it is also interesting to note where and how the customer journey continues on from online video. Video can and does assist in the continuation of the customer journey towards these other social media platforms. The trick is optimizing YouTube to tap the full potential online video has in supporting and continuing the customer journey:...

YouTube can now deliver live TV to a global audience at the same scale as TV. But the future of live Web video is probably going to be niche, not mass.

That crazy leap that Felix Baumgartner made was astonishing.
And if you’re interested in the future of Web video, YouTube’s ability to serve up eight million livestreams at the same time is a really big deal, too.

As I noted yesterday, that number blows away YouTube’s previous peak of 500,000 concurrent streams, which it hit this summer during the Olympics, as well as last year during the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

So it doesn’t take much imagination to envision YouTube doing this kind of stuff, at this scale, on a regular basis. Which would mean the Web finally has a chance to rival TV when it comes to serving up live events with huge audiences — one of TV’s last remaining advantages over the Internet....

But YouTube is still going to be an important platform for live stuff. It’s just that you probably won’t see most of it, unless you’re in a very particular niche....

[Interesting perspective on TV & social TV from mega big events to mini niches ~ Jeff]