The Pros And Cons Of Youtube
The online world is built with many platforms to share content on. From the favourite social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and then of course there’s the platforms with more scope to produce creative content, such as Vimeo, Vine and YouTube. Of these three, YouTube is the one that the masses are more likely to be familiar with. Some of you might be wondering right now what this has to do with marketing, YouTube has a reputation for endless amounts of amateur content, but can it not be a valuable marketing tool as well?
In other posts you might have read you’ll have seen I’ve talked about the benefits of viral videos and how bigger conglomerates are using them to market their own products. What we’re prone to forget is that in order for these videos to be a success, they need a popular video platform. Hello YouTube. The benefits of YouTube are endless, though you might not know it, there’s more to it than just being free and simple… which in itself is pretty smashing, all things considered.
YouTube focuses largely on how your video content is viewed on other online platforms. When you upload a video, you have the option to share it in at least ten different forms. The most common of these would be Facebook, Twitter, Google+… but then there’s others: Bebo, Tumblr, Reddit, Pinterest and Odnoklassniki (which, going off my five Russian lessons, is Russian – but that’s as much light as I can shed) are all on the extensive list. The analytical features on YouTube are incredibly clear and beneficial as well as allowing you to see whether you are targeting the right demographic. It is carefully assessed by age, gender, location as well as other means of analysis and is formatted in nice graphs so you can see where and who your video reaching – and be very smug when Madagascar is highlighted on the map feature, as unlikely as that is.
You might not know it, but Google has suspiciously close ties with YouTube… as a result YouTube often ranks highly in Google web results. I recently found out that YouTube is also the second largest search engine, so when you’re wandering in and out of web domains searching for the benefits of YouTube, like me, you might stumble across this video blog from Lambda Films, a Norwich online production company. It lists a few useful pros and cons when it comes to YouTube.
The video details how a ‘well optimised’ YouTube vid might appear above the web results in the Google ranks. This happens when Google selects it as quality content that contends with the other web results. In order for this to occur your video has to be well optimised though, and fortunately YouTube has a feature to tag the video with relevant subjects, so get tagging.
Although it’s free, it does not in any way suggest YouTube is unprofessional. Actually, it has the potential to really give your business a leg up… so I’d advise using YouTube to any online marketer.
Watch Masters in Politics our latest YouTube video, and to learn more about video production and video marketing take a look at this video marketing course from Retina Burn.
Tags: corporate video production, Video Marketing, video production
