The Beginner’s Guide to Using YouTube in Your Social Media Marketing

When you hear people talk about social media, rarely do they mention anything about YouTube. This is sort of surprising since YouTube is the second ranked search engine of choice by volume. Now, more than ever, YouTube users can up being just as valuable, if not more valuable, than traditional social media followers. On top of this JARVEE added support for Youtube automation so this is a platform everyone should start taking advantage of!

What Makes YouTube Unique in the Social Media Landscape?

While the userbase makes up the heart and soul of all social media platforms, a subscriber on YouTube is much more important than a follower on either Facebook or Twitter. Organic Facebook followers are much harder to reach than they used to be, and Twitter followers see a torrent of tweets by the hour, making it likely that your tweets go unnoticed.

Unlike any other social network however, nearly 85% of adults consider themselves a “regular” YouTube user. In addition, it is extremely easy to use, since a Gmail account is all someone needs to create their own playlists, vote on videos, use the comment system, or become a subscriber.

The ease of use, combined with the ability to create so many different social signals, makes YouTube an important part of any social network marketing strategy. These users are going to see your new videos, they are going to pay attention to the message in the videos, and they can even help attract new subscribers.

The Process of Making Interesting Videos

Making videos that people enjoy can be tough, especially if you are just starting out. Most people like to do things at their own pace, which makes it even more important that your video is good, or people won’t want to waste their time with it. A couple of basic guidelines for creating an interesting video include:

• Keeping it short in length – The average video is around 4 minutes long.
• Take cues from your competitors – Watch a few videos from others in your industry and take note of what they do and say.
• Use a professional marketing team – You will notice that the most popular YouTube videos (excluding music videos) almost all feature the uploader as the star of the video. Unless you are extremely personable, able to look good on camera, and are energetic and entertaining yourself, you should probably leave the actual video production to a professional.

How to Promote Your Videos

Once you have your first video ready to go, you need to promote it the right way, or it may end up being completely unnoticed by the YouTube community. This can be done by:

• Give it a good description – The title and description for your video can help bring in search traffic both on YouTube, and through search engines. This is incredibly important, especially when you are just starting out, since the value of an individual viewer or subscriber is much higher when there is a low number of them in the first place. Think about what people might be searching for and if your video would be a good fit for them. Throw a couple of those keywords into your title or description, and you should be ready to upload it.
• Comment on related videos – While this might seem a little “spammy”, it is still one of the best ways to get your video in front of a targeted audience. There is a good chance that if a viewer is interested in the video that you commented on, and it is at least somewhat relevant, they may be interested in yours as well. This is best done while your channel is still young and you do not have a lot of subscribers. Building up a healthy subscriber base is crucial to your success, and you will probably gain a few subscribers with this method. Doing it too often though, and doing it when you already have a fair amount of subscribers, will lead to diminishing returns.
• Use your existing social media accounts to promote your videos – If your other social media accounts already have a decent number of followers, you can use your videos as posted content. This gives your other social media accounts some variety, since you are posting a video, and it will direct people already interested in your business or website to YouTube, where they may become subscribers there as well.
• Keep people on your channel with in-video links – Having a link to another one of your videos come up when people are almost done watching their first video will keep people around longer. This increases the chance that they will perform an action which can cause your video to become more popular. They might become a subscriber, give it a thumbs up, or even share it off-site. The longer you keep someone engaged, which can be easy with an in-video link, the more valuable that person becomes to you.

For those of you starting out with YouTube, you will probably find that promoting your videos is going to be the hardest part. Over time, as long as you keep adding quality videos, it should become easier as your success starts to build upon itself.

The most popular YouTube stars do not have to worry about how they are going to promote their videos, they are going to get hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of views no matter what specifically because they are already wildly popular. You on the other hand will need to keep promotion in the forefront of your mind.

There are so many different ways that YouTube users can increase your social media presence, and by extension your main website or business. You don’t really see the same kind of versatility with other social networks, but the tradeoff is that you absolutely need to keep users engaged more than with just written content.

If you make good videos, and you promote them the right way, you will probably have a lot of success building a YouTube following, which can end up giving you a big return on your social media budget.