Background of YouTube

In 2004, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, three former Paypal employees, envisioned a place where users can upload, view, and share videos via the Internet.  In February of 2005, their envision became reality when the three masterminds launched what is now known as “YouTube”.  A year later YouTube was named one of the fastest growing websites on the web and was ranked the 5th most popular website in the world.

Google saw the rapid growth and potential of YouTube and knew they had to make some moves.  In late 2006, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion dollars (whoa!).  YouTube is now the 3rd most popular website in the world, getting over 800 million unique visitors each month.  Here are a few mind blowing statistics regarding YouTube’s website traffic.

YouTube’s Website Traffic

Source: Youtube

Top 5 Most Popular Websites in the World – 2012

Source: Alexa

A Powerful Marketing Tool

If these statistics haven’t convinced you to start using YouTube for marketing purposes then I don’t know what will.  Maybe I can shed some more light for you.  Let me give you an industry specific example of how YouTube can benefit a business.

Let’s say you own a small auto detailing business and are looking for ways to acquire more clients.  The first thing you want to do is analyze how your current and past clients found out about your detailing services/products.  How would you go about finding an auto detailing business?  Chances are you’d use Google or perhaps another reputable search engine like Yahoo or Bing.  Let’s face it.  Consumers turn to the Internet to find information about products and services.  Therefore, business owners should turn to the Internet to find consumers.  This makes sense right?

“There are hundreds of fish in the sea. You just have to use the right bait to catch the one you’re looking for.”

So, if I’m a consumer looking to get my car waxed, what might I do first?  Personally, I would try to tackle the job myself to save some money.  I might search Google for “How to wax a black car“.  If you search “How to wax a black car” on Google, this is what you get:

Using the phrase “How to” in a Google search query will not only show YouTube videos on the first page, but rather in the first three results.  In this case, searching “How to wax a black car” shows us a YouTube video in the third organic result.  This is why you should be creating informative videos and uploading them to YouTube. You’ll gain exposure and will most certainly acquire new business.

Uploading your videos to YouTube is easy.  Optimizing your videos so that they have a greater potential of showing up in search results for specific keywords and phrases is the part that most people overlook.  However, it’s simple.  Here are some important aspects of YouTube video optimization:

Title

Just like with SEO (search engine optimization), the title of your video is very important.  This is the first thing that Google/YouTube looks at when deciding what results to show for a specific search query.   You’ll want to title your video using keywords and phrases that you wish to be found for.  In this case, “How to wax a black car”.  Notice how most of the words used in my search query are in the title of the video.

Description

The description of your video is what people read to get a better understanding of what your video is all about.  It’s best to include a link to your website at the end of your description.  This will help increase traffic to your website and could potentially lead to more sales.

Tags

Tags are another important part of video optimization.  You should include at least 5 to 7 relevant keywords as tags for each of your videos.  Using tags will associate your video with other similarly tagged videos, which will allow your video to be shown as a “related video.” This will help you generate additional views from people who were originally watching other videos.

While there are other things that influence what videos show up in search results, these are certainly the most important.  If you create quality, informative videos that people will want to watch, and incorporate these optimization tactics, you’ll be in good shape.  Good luck!

The post YouTube Optimization: A Must for Marketers appeared first on Clix.

This year the candidates are all on social media and they all have a lot of followers, so does that mean everyone is even?  Is social media not going to play a big part in this election, because everyone is doing it and there is nothing new or innovative this time around?  It looks like the Obama campaign might have another trick up their sleeve when it comes to engaging people with their campaign online.

The Obama campaign has recently released a 17-minute video on his own YouTube page.  The video is narrated by Tom Hanks and called “The Road We’ve Traveled”.  This video is going to appear on a new YouTube platform that enables the Obama campaign to turn the passive experience of watching a video into a great organizing and fund-raising tool.  This technology is going to allow viewers of this video to post campaign content to their Facebook pages, volunteer, and donate to the campaign.  They are going to be able to do this all from President Obama’s YouTube page.

This is a step above simply putting out a video, as the YouTube platform will give the Obama campaign the ability to get visitors to share the content, or pledge their support.  This is the one-click approach that campaigns see as an integral part of their online strategy.  This type of video being released shows the importance that political campaigns are starting to put on web-video.  The online video is now being seen as a valid tool for proactive electioneering.

The Obama campaign is thinking that video will be the primary way they communicate with undecided voters, because it offers them a way to spread their messages into online communities, where friends and family members will discuss and debate.  This helps the video look more like dialogue and a constructive discussion, rather than political propaganda.  This provides a level of interaction that a TV advertisement cannot provide.

The idea is to get these videos into the hands of trusted people in the different networks.  If people start to share the videos, it will add a degree of credibility because a friend or family member is endorsing it.  This is taken more serious than a traditional TV commercial.  The major change with the videos being released is that they give people something to act on.  The Obama campaign wants to bring their engagement tools to their supporters.

The Obama campaign already has a head start with that, since his Facebook page has over 25 million likes.  Do you think it’s possible for social media to change minds or convince an undecided voter one way or another?

The post Obama Using Videos and Social Media in Campaign. appeared first on Clix.

So why has the most shared video of 2012 completely gone against conventional wisdom?  KONY 2012 is 29 minutes long and isn’t funny at all, yet it has been seen more than any other video so far this year, at last count it was viewed 73,999,551 times since being uploaded on March 5^th.  It has also been shared more than 7.6 million times on Facebook and embedded in more than 6,200 blogs.  There have been nearly 5,000 news sources that have written about “KONY 2012”.

There is a recent study that was done by the University of South Australia.  The study identified the emotions that are most likely to be shared across the social web.  They found that most videos are amusing or boring, and most of them don’t go viral.  They found that videos, which evoke marked physiological responses, such as laughter, anger, crying, or shock are most likely to be shared.  So if you laugh or cry, you are more likely to share than if you smile or frown.  Videos that evoke positive emotions such as exhilaration, hilarity, astonishment, happiness, and inspiration are more likely to be shared than negative emotions such as anger, disgust, sadness, shock or frustration.

What does this mean for video marketers?  Knowing the emotions that people respond to and are most likely to share is a great indicator of how to make content in the future.  One lesson learned is that laughter is not the only way to get people to share your video, although hilarity is easily the most likely emotion to get your video shared.

The “KONY 2012” video shows us that the stronger the emotion, the more likely a video will get shared.  This says pick the emotion you are aiming for and then crank it up.  Being positive is a much safer bet when doing this as anger can lead to users becoming irritated and cause a backlash.

Of course this data doesn’t tell the full story, there can be things happening offline, the possibility of you having used the product before, and if the video is being promoted in one way or another.  Also you might find a video hilarious that I find disgusting or vice versa.  The main takeaway is we never know which video will catch on, however the stronger the emotion that video evokes, the more likely it will be shared.  Humor is no longer the only factor when making a viral video.

Here is the “KONY 2012” video in case you haven’t seen it and a funny marketing video about shaving.

KONY 2012

DollarShaveClub.com

Which one do you like more, is one more effective than the other?  Tell us what you think, how can this affect SEO, or Social Media?

The post Viral videos are changing marketing tactics. appeared first on Clix.