An Introduction to YouTube for Business

YouTube is the perfect medium to establish an interactive visual presence for your brand. Because YouTube is free, easy to use and has unlimited reach, there’s no reason why you can’t add it to your digital marketing strategy.

There’s lots to be gained from posting video’s related to your industry, company, staff or customers. Fundamentally YouTube can help your organic ranking on Google and other search engines, encourage viral activity, help your customers interact with your brand, sustain trust, and add value to your customers experience.

Like any social media tool, YouTube is often used incorrectly by businesses. So in order for you to get the most out of your YouTube channel we’ve compiled a list of some key things you should do.

1) Customise your channel
First things first, add your company’s branding, choose colors to compliment your company’s look, and add information about your business along with useful links. In the early set up stage it’s important to enable the ‘subscribe to’ feature which will let users subscribe to your channel and help them to keep up to date with your uploads.

2) Don’t dive straight in
There’s no need to upload all of your videos on the first day as this will leave you with little or no content for the coming weeks. Instead it’s best to start with a good intro video that will get users excited and interested in your brand. Follow this with good secondary material and begin to drip feed more and more videos in. By working in this manner you’ll ensure you have regular content and won’t run the risk of leaving your channel idle.

3) Avoid recycling your advertising
Using your channel to simply upload your advertisements will put users off. There’s no harm in posting some ads but try to mix it up a little by posting useful things relative to your brand, company, product/service or industry. For example, if you have a technical product you may want to upload a ‘how to’ video highlighting crafty hints and tips of how customers can get the most out of their purchase. Alternatively if you are a restaurant you may wish to film themed nights, birthday parties or events your venue has hosted and pop the footage up.

4) Use tags
YouTube’s content is organized on a tag word basis so you should always ensure that your video is correctly tagged to increase your chances of users finding it. Try to think outside the box when adding tags as you can’t predict what people will use in their search terms. It’s also a good idea to monitor the performance of your videos based on the tags you’ve used. You’ll also get to nominate up to 15 categories when you post videos so be sure to pick the most relevant so that you maximise your chances of it getting seen.

5) Think about your feature reel
The feature reel (the video that automatically starts playing as soon as someone logs on to your channel) is the only chance you have to keep an audience captivated. Use an attention grabbing showcase that will encourage users to explore your channel. Update this with current news, info or hot new videos to keep your audience interested.

6) Promote your videos
Every time you post a video you need to tell as many people as you can so start by blogging about it, tweeting it and adding it to your Facebook page because unless you do, viewers won’t know that it exists. Set up your channel so that any video you post gets automatically published to your Twitter and Facebook accounts – this way you won’t forget. Post a link to your channel on your website, you could even feature your channel’s most viewed video.

7) Don’t ignore comments
It’s great when people comment on your videos to say how useful they found them. Unfortunately however you won’t always be at the receiving end of pleasant comments and there may be times when you need to make a decision about negativity. You do have the power to delete offensive remarks or spam however it’s obviously not a good idea to instantly remove every critical comment. You should seek to remove any that include offensive language or spam and as for the others it’s probably best to leave them as they are as this will make you look more genuine and will encourage users who disagree with the negativity to post some nice positive comments in opposition. You can also consider moderating comments before they go live to prevent any nasty remarks appearing without your consent.

8) Use YouTube analytics
Find out view stats, demographics, community and how users discovered your video all for free using YouTube’s free analytics data. Simply click the ‘Insight’ button to get access to the data. Using it will only help you increase your effectiveness.

9) Don’t neglect your channel
It looks bad if your channel is neglected and users will quickly look for a more up to date provider if they think you are out of the loop. In order to maintain a steady upload schedule don’t upload everything at once. If you find you have nothing to upload that doesn’t mean you can’t contribute – log in to stay on top of comments, friend requests etc. so that you still appear active.

10) Use subtitles
The innovative auto-captioning tool has been made available to all YouTube users since March 2010. Basically you can add subtitles to your videos to make them accessible by hearing impaired individuals, ensuring your content is accessible to anyone who’d like to watch it.

11) Be annotation aware
YouTube enables you to add comments that display over the top of your video footage. This is obviously a useful tool when you need to explain something or highlight a key point however generally they look unprofessional and act as a distraction.

Get in touch today if you’d like to discuss how we can help you brand and develop a YouTube channel for your business.