How to use Youtube to Promote your Business

Posted • October 19, 2009 • 2 Comments

So What’s a Business to do that Wants to Create an Informative Video and Share it with People?

I’ve been doing some research the last couple of days on videos, as you might’ve been able to tell on my previous post on this blog. There are a couple of different video services out there, including Youtube and Vimeo. The following search stats (provided by Gary Pool) show some related keyword phrases and their estimated daily searches.

youtube – 427,165
funny videos – 39,069
youtube videos – 25,855
homemade videos – 13,379
better than youtube – 5,576
you tube videos – 4,481
home made videos – 4,430
similar to youtube – 4,151
other sites like youtube – 1,877

Those are pretty decent stats and they show a lot of usage centered around amateur videos and comedy. This isn’t surprising because for the most part Vimeo and Youtube are intended to be video sites that aren’t commercial in basis. Vimeo even discourages informational videos, viewing them as infomercials.

So what is a business to do that wants to create an informative video and share it with people?

You can upload such videos to Youtube. You do need to avoid being overly promotional in these videos. Promotional in this case means creating a video that pushes your products or services on people. An informational video should inform people about a topic they find interesting. At the same time, it doesn’t hurt to mention that people can find more videos on your website. In fact, that’s where the marketing comes into play. Provide some free videos that show people some information about a topic they want to learn about, and let them know they can find more videos. You need to be subtle about it, so when you make a video, make sure it starts on your website, and moves from that to the topic you’ll be focusing on. People see the website, or see your logo, and then learn some free information and if they want more they can go to your website.

Video, at this point, in social media strategy is under incorporated into marketing. Part of that is because both Youtube and Vimeo discourage the use of video in that way, preferring that it primarily be a consumer phenomenon, but some of it also is simply that people have not looked at utilizing it effectively to create video testimonials, information videos, or other helpful videos that people will want. This will change as people get more comfortable using video and either learn how to host some video on their own site, or if a video site is created that is priced reasonably and enables people to post commercial videos. Below is a link to a video, created by yours truly, which discusses what social media is. The focus of the video is to present information. At the very end people can also go to my website to view more videos. I’m not pushing a product, but I am providing information and an opportunity to view more videos. It works really well as a funnel to my website, and what people do, once there, is of course their own choice (Note the picture of the video is just a picture).

What is Social Media

What’s nice about Youtube is that the videos are non-intrusive. The view chooses to view the video as opposed to having to watch the video once s/he goes to a website. That non-intrusiveness is what we should shoot for with any videos we create that people will view on our websites.

Taylor Ellwood
Business, Writing, & Social Media Coach

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