Article by Katina Beveridge, ASBAS Advisor, Western Sydney Business Centre
Everything You Need to Know About YouTube for Business
YouTube is our number one source for video content — from funny videos to tutorials to documentaries. In fact, YouTube is even considered the second biggest search engine after Google. The video platform has more than a billion active users and can be accessed in 76 different languages, making it very expansive and highly popular.
However, most businesses fail to realise the marketing potential of YouTube. When they think about social media marketing, they only consider Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. What business owners and marketers don’t know is that they are missing out on a huge marketing opportunity by disregarding YouTube.
Here are the numbers that show why YouTube is a great marketing platform for businesses:
• 300 hours of video are uploaded on YouTube every day.
• YouTube reaches more 18-49 year-olds on mobile.
• 59% of executives prefer watching videos than reading text.
• 6 out of 10 people would rather watch online videos than television.
Marketing experts predict that video continue to be the king of content so we can only expect continuous growth for the video platform going forward.
How do you leverage the huge marketing potential of YouTube? Here’s everything you need to know and do to maximise YouTube.
1. Sign up for an account.
Unlike other social media platforms, you don’t need to have a YouTube account to access its content. However, you need to sign up for an account if you want to upload videos and engage with other users. You can use an existing Google account, or create a new one, for your YouTube account. Complete all details asked and upload a profile and cover photo.
2. Customise your YouTube profile.
If you’re going to use YouTube to promote your business, make sure to fill out all your business information, particularly your website and contact information. You also need to personalise your YouTube channel with an avatar and a channel name.
3. Upload engaging videos to your channel.
There are different types of videos you can create and upload to YouTube, depending on your strategy. You can create brand videos, how dos, interviews with influencers, testimonials, animated videos, tutorials, documentaries, and much more. Don’t forget to optimise your videos for the search engines by including keywords, thumbnails, tags, descriptions and other metadata.
4. Add a subtitle.
One of the best ways to let your viewers understand what the video is all about is by adding subtitles and closed captions. It also helps optimise your video for search by including keywords in it. You can either upload a supported timed subtitle file or provide a full transcript of the video and leave the timing to YouTube.
5. Share away!
The best way to promote your content is by sharing it. You can share it to your other social media channels, to your website, your personal social media accounts, or disseminate via email. You can also invest in video discovery ads or in-stream ads to drive traffic to your content.
YouTube has a lot of untapped potential which can immensely boost your business sales and growth. According to Cisco, online videos will account for more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2022 — 15x higher than it was in 2017. Investing in YouTube marketing now could mean setting up your business online for the future.
