Do You Use YouTube For Marketing?

This is a tricky question for many web businesses. Using YouTube after all is not an isolated occurrence. There are some pre-suppositions. Topping that list is the actual making of online video for marketing, and that in turn means that there exists an understanding of the need and the technique to make online video.

YouTube is primarily a video sharing site. So are plenty of others, namely Metacafe, Dailymotion, Viddler, Blip.tv, and so on. But YouTube is the king of them all.

And now YouTube is striding to become a social media destination. Which means that if your business interest embraces both video and social media for marketing, then YouTube is the best choice for you.

Social media, as of now, is largely a free vehicle that can be boarded at any convenient time. However, it’s still not very clear how, for example, being in Facebook can work best for your company’s interests.

Yes, like YouTube, Facebook accepts video too. But, does video really help in shaping up the opinion of the crowd at Facebook in the way that benefits your business? In absence of specific studies, doubts exist as to the veracity of the claims that videos are a great business enhancer at Facebook.

No such thing for YouTube because it is a proclaimed video sharing site from the very beginning. Can it be considered a social media vehicle? Perhaps yes, but surely not as interactive as Facebook.

YouTube’s importance lies elsewhere. It’s about the size. YouTube is mighty big, bigger than what many people imagine.

YouTube’s Demand

In the latest Alexa.Com list of top 500 global sites (image below), YouTube occupies the third position, after Facebook but ahead of even Yahoo!. True YouTube is behind Facebook in this list, but in terms of anything to do with online video it is the undisputed king.

Coming to strictly video-related analysis, YouTube’s popularity is amply evident from comScore’s May, 2010 figures. An all-time high of 14.6 billion videos were viewed at YouTube in the US, averaging 101.2 videos per viewer. YouTube’s share of videos seen is a jaw-dropping 43.1% of the total during the period, which is about 13 times that of the next position-holder Hulu with 3.5%.

Those are awesome figures, underlying the emergence of and the hold YouTube exercises on the online video scene. With that in perspective, there is perhaps less doubt about both the importance of video as a marketing tool, and using YouTube for the purpose.

Video Supply To YouTube

If people’s demand from YouTube is on a constant uptrend, the question that comes to mind is which videos people see the most there. There have been a few studies that give some glimpse of visitors’ preference at YouTube.

Sysomos, a social media analytics company based in Toronto, came out with a pioneering study on video usage in YouTube in February 2010 here and here. They analyzed 2.5 million unique YouTube videos between July and December 2009 along with the blog posts that embedded the videos or linked to them.

Here are some interesting findings from their study:

1. Music is the most popular category with 31% of all analyzed videos (this also finds support in this article), followed by Entertainment (15%) and People & Blogs (11%). Surprisingly, categories like Education (4.1%), How-To (3.1%), and Science & technology (2.86%) rank quite low (refer the following image, courtesy Sysomos). This apparently goes contrary to another study that found education as the top reason marketers use video contents (details below).



2. Most videos are linked from North America (38%), followed by Europe (36%), Asia & Oceania (15%) and South America (11%).
3. YouTube is the most popular video platform with 81.9% of total embedded and linked videos, followed by Vimeo (8.8%), Dailymotion (4%) and MySpace (1.1%).
4. After the US, the most popular countries for YouTube videos within blogs are Brazil, Spain, the UK and Canada. Within the US, California, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida are the places in that order that have the most bloggers engaged with video.

How Companies Plan To Use Video For Marketing

Let us look at another survey which seeks to find marketers’ adoption and use of social media for their company’s marketing efforts. The study is done by King Fish Media, along with Hub Spot and Junta42, and the research work can be downloaded free after enrollment.

Although the study focuses on the whole gamut of the social media usage and planning by the marketers, let me pick out the points relevant with the aspect of online video. Some important findings are as under:

1. Only 50% of the marketers are using video as part of social media campaigns.
2. For social media planning the most preferred destination is LinkedIn (87%), followed closely by Twitter (84%), and Facebook (78%). YouTube appears way below (refer the following image taken from the research paper) at 47%. This clearly indicates that the video usage in YouTube has a long gap to catch up, probably indicating a big opportunity there.



3. Only 35% of the respondents have a YouTube channel, which is not surprising given the figure above.
4. 61% use videos hosted in their own sites, while 56% use video sharing sites like YouTube. Do the marketers feel that hosted videos lower the image of a site? Maybe the answer lies in the point below.
5. A whopping 72% of the marketers surveyed use web video for the purpose of educating viewers about the products and services. This is perhaps logical given that many website owners see video as replacing texts and images that had hitherto done the sales pitch. It may be likely that the marketers feel the product videos would rather be hosted in own facilities than on YouTube.

Summing Up

While there is a lot to catch up for the marketers to start making more videos as part of their social media strategies, what becomes apparent is that YouTube clearly is the most preferred destination to garner maximum benefits from the videos.

Fortunately, making a YouTube online video, dare I say, is quite easy, and one can make and host a video in maybe just half an hour.

There is no need to feel intimidated by the prospect of making online videos. There are many how-to video tutorials in this blog on the topic. Some of them are as below:

1. Squeaky Clean YouTube Video For You

 

2. Online YouTube Video Editor Is A Boon For Amateur Video Makers

 

3. The Smart Easy Road From PowerPoint To YouTube

 

4. Embed Online Video From YouTube To PowerPoint Easily

Update

Aug 31, 2010: According to this BBC report, comic acts dominate a new list of the biggest-earning independent video makers on YouTube.

Sep 3, 2010: A TubeMogul study of 133,975 YouTube users reveals that more than 80% haven’t uploaded any video in 2010. Less than 10% upload 1 video a month, and about 6% upload 1-4 videos every month. Only about 3% users upload more than 1 video per week. Refer the chart below, sourced from Business Insider.