By Diane Sofranec, Managing Editor
If your company has Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, you may think you’ve got social media covered. But if you don’t regularly upload videos to YouTube, you’re missing out.
Here are five reasons why YouTube is a social media platform you simply can’t ignore.
1. YouTube has more than 1 billion users worldwide.
No surprise here. Everybody knows YouTube is the site to visit when you want to watch a video. In the United States, 81 percent of Millennials, 58 percent of Generation Xers and 43 percent of Baby Boomers use YouTube. What is surprising is that only 9 percent of small businesses in this country use YouTube, according to statistics compiled by DMR.
2. YouTube is more than crazy cat videos and movie trailers.
Because anyone can upload a video to YouTube, the videos are as unique as the people who watch them. Consider creating videos that showcase tips related to your company’s products or services, share your company’s history, and highlight fun employee events and activities. There’s an 11-hour(!) limit for videos, but keep them to just a couple minutes to hold viewers’ attention. There’s also a place to include a summary and web address, so videos can help boost traffic to your company’s website.
3. There’s more than one way to use YouTube.
Sure, YouTube has billions of users, but they don’t all create and upload video. YouTube makes it easy to share, comment on, and rate videos, too. Create a compelling video, and it might make the rounds on other social media sites, like Facebook.
4. YouTube is widely believed to be the second-largest search engine behind Google.
YouTube is comprised of a lot of videos. Users upload an astounding 300 hours of content every minute. To find the content they’re looking for, YouTube users search the site, which has pushed YouTube toward the top of the search engine heap. To ensure your company name pops up in a YouTube search, post a video. As an added bonus, YouTube videos rank in Google searches because Google owns YouTube.
5. YouTube makes it easy to upload and track your videos.
It’s easy to shoot a video on your smartphone and instantly upload it to your YouTube page. Then, you can use YouTube Analytics to track its popularity. There’s no need to notify subscribers to your YouTube channel that you posted a new video, because YouTube does that for you.
So what are you waiting for? Create a company video, establish a channel, and get your company’s information out there, for billions to see.
Diane Sofranec has more than 25 years experience in B2B media. She joined North Coast Media in 2013 as a digital content producer. Now managing editor of the company’s Pest Management Professional magazine, Sofranec frequently writes about social media and mobile trends and techniques.
Photo credit: Rego – d4u.hu via Foter.com / CC BY-SA
