More than a billion of people around the world use YouTube. In just ten years of its existence, this service has changed both the way of media consumption and the methods that world’s most famous brands use to communicate with their customers. YouTube changed the world. For decades, to watch any video, we had to adapt to the schedule of the TV channel, the theater’s repertoire or visit a local video rental store. Today, not only we can watch the video whenever we want, but we can also create them. “Broadcast Yourself” – the first motto of the service symbolizes hitherto unknown possibilities. YouTube has become a landmark in the history of media development.
At TimeCamp, we try to make use of this excellent website as often as possible. All our tutorials in a straightforward video format are available on our YouTube channel. You can learn there how to integrate our software with other project management tools and, generally, how to use TimeCamp to its fullest!
But that’s enough about us, let’s check the possibilities that YouTube offers.
From the article you will learn:
- Whether YouTube advertising is effective
- How to prepare your YouTube channel from the perspective of user experience
- How to start a payable “TrueView in-stream” campaign
- What are the prices of advertising on YouTube
- Why YouTube is more effective advertising tool than Facebook
- Why subscribers are important for your YouTube account.
The power of video
Barely after 18 months from its debut, YouTube was bought by the giant – Google. This merger meant that the service had become the second largest search engine in the world. The continuous investments made by Google turned this video service into the golden goose, which year by year pushes up the financial results higher. Every year the number of hours per month that YouTube users spend watching movies increases by 50%. Consciously or not, people all around the world started to co-create a great video machine. More than 300 hours of the new footage appears on YouTube every minute. So, how to make your video or channel shine in this thicket of video content? There are some tips that should be helpful when it comes to understanding the “magic” of YouTube community.
The plan is the foundation
While on Facebook a brand must have a company profile, to start publishing content on YouTube you need to create an account. It looks highly unprofessional when movies promoting your brand are being published via a private account of some lady from the marketing department. Therefore, the first step is to establish the channel and prepare it adequately:
- Give your channel a URL name
- Create graphics for the background – something that reflects the character of your brand
- Prepare an attractive description of your company, so that the customer who is browsing through your YouTube channel, gets to know you better
- In the section “Information” place the links to other social media profiles of your company
I assume that if you made a decision to start with YouTube, you already have some videos prepared. Try to group them into playlists in a deliberate way, so that YouTube users will quickly find the desired materials and that while checking the channel, they will come upon the ones that you think are important. Consider the order of the playlist on the channel. If you have done all these tasks, you are ready to take the first step toward communication with a customer
“TrueView In-Stream”
YouTube offers several opportunities to promote the brand. The one that directly engages the viewer with video advertising is called “TrueView In-Stream” – a pre-roll with a “turn off” option. To start displaying paid ads in your YouTube videos, you need to set up a Google Adwords account.
“TrueView In-Stream” advertisement is nothing but a short video appearing before the right video that a user selected. Frequently advertisers decide to promote a video that is no longer than 30 seconds. It is worth mentioning that YouTube does not ration the duration of the paid-up footage – it can be of any length. For the first five seconds of a video, users are forced to watch the promoted content, and then decide whether they want to continue to watch the advertisement, or to resign by clicking on the “Skip it” button.
The advertiser pays only for the part of the commercial that has not been omitted. This form of advertising also provides free redirection to the website of your choice. It is worth mentioning that the more users watch the YouTube ads to the end, the cheaper they get.
The cost of one video display varies from a few to several cents (very rarely exceeding the rate calculated in dollars). The rates for watching are determined by the auction (as it’s in the case of Adwords ad or a Facebook campaign). Since advertising on YouTube is less popular than paid campaigns on Facebook, with much less financial outlay it is possible to achieve far better results.
There is yet another reason to choose a paid campaign on YouTube.
YouTube = Engaged Community
Nowadays, there is only a scant of companies around the world that do not conduct communication with Facebook. It is also no secret that the appearance of Facebook drastically limited the range of corporate websites. In result, enormous resources invested by the companies have been wasted, because the prepared content has reached only the small part of the audience, or hasn’t at all.
On Facebook, ten thousand fans of the company’s fan page do not mean that it actually has ten thousand engaged users. It looks entirely different on YouTube. There, it is much harder to convince people to subscribe to our channel. It requires months or even years of work – but the gained group of subscribers becomes substantially committed to the channel. In the case of YouTube, the relationship between the brand and a subscriber is simple – the more subscribers there are the better the effects of the content transmission. Any person who is your subscriber receives an e-mail with information that you’ve just added the video to your channel. YouTube also uses algorithms to more accurately position the channels with a large number of subscribers. It is, therefore, important to build such a video content, that it would encourage viewers to subscribe to our channel.
What is more, YouTube offers a huge substantive support to all parties interested in conducting their channels. It is advisable to make use of Google Support and deepen the knowledge about some useful tools.
Facebook vs. YouTube
Between Google and Facebook, there is a constant fight for users. As popular tool as YouTube sooner or later must have had an effect on its competitor. Where there is a success, there are also copycats. Facebook quickly noticed how much it is losing by putting aside a video content. For a long time, Mark Zuckerberg and his entourage have been working on creating serious competition for YouTube. The proof for this may be for example the introduction of an auto-playing function (which in my opinion is more annoying than useful.)
A fierce battle between Facebook and Google is good news for marketers. Healthy competition usually results in the emergence of new opportunities. Therefore, it is almost sure that in the near future they are going to introduce solutions that will give people more opportunities to promote their brand among the customers.