Videos are scary to make. No one likes the sound of their voice or the way they look on camera, much less putting themselves out there to be critiqued. To that we say – too bad. Leveraging YouTube is a great opportunity to promote your business.
YouTube is a great way to promote your business, products and people. It has been around since 2005, and is currently the second largest search engine, processing 3 billion searches each month. It is bigger than Bing, Yahoo!, and AOL combined.
Now that you’re sold on leveraging videos, here are some tips for incorporating YouTube into your strategy.
How to Use YouTube for Business:
- Create consistent content. Map out a 3-month calendar that outlines themes, guests and calls-to-action. Start with posting once a week and if the response is good, consider upping it to twice a week.
- Always have a call-to-action. This could be, “please ‘like’ our video,” “share our video,” or “mention this video and receive 10% off.” Be creative.
- Optimize and customize your channel. Add keywords, a description, colors, links and images. This also will help people find you when searching on the Google.
- Add category and tags. Last we checked there were over 15 categories in YouTube to o choose from. You can also manually add extra tags and variations on those tags.
- Collaborate. Bring in businesses that you partner with to be a guest. This will increase your reach as that company is going to share over their networks. Chat with your customers about their experiences interacting with your brand – others talking about you is much more effective than you talking about yourself.
- Add subtitles. A person can then watch your video at anytime with the sound off. Which means they can watch at work without their boss knowing.
- Share your video. Embed the video on your website, blog or your Facebook page. Your videos need to exist outside of YouTube to ensure success.
- Short and simple. Keep it short. Those cat videos you see are never more than a minute tops. The shorter they are the more shareable they become. Hell, you might just go viral (don’t get us started on this).
How Not to Use YouTube for Business:
- Do not make 20 minute videos – ain’t nobody got time for that. We are busy people and we get distracted easily. Videos need to be short, to the point, entertaining and have a call-t0-action. If you are just creating it to stroke your own ego, then go ahead but no one is going to watch.
- Don’t be self-absorbed. If you are only going to blather on and on about your company then you are missing the point. No one wants to be friends with the person that only cares about themselves. Boring.
- Stop with the close-up. We do not want to see your pores or up your nose. Pick an appropriate setting and change it up consistently.
- Don’t expect people to find you. You can’t just set it and forget it. If you only post on YouTube, then how will anyone even know your channel exists? YouTube is just one tool in your tool box.
We could go on and on but for the sake of brevity and us practicing what we preach, we will end on this note: The total number of people who use YouTube is 1,300,000,000.
Yeah, just let that sink in.
