YouTube is the second most visited site in the world and as social media dominates the communications airwaves, PR people are turning to sites like YouTube to promote their companies.
As an online platform, YouTube provides a continuous presence 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and it’s completely free. It also offers the notion of a brand channel, which provides an appropriate structure and context for a company’s video.
There are many great online PR ideas that can take place on YouTube, but it has more credibility if it takes place in the perspective of a brand channel.
With a much wider demographic now choosing to gain their news/ information online, and with a large number of those people not having a long enough attention span to read an article or press release, YouTube is perfect as company’s can upload a short video with key messages about the company and all the audience has to do is watch it for a couple of minutes.
The types of videos uploaded by a company might include a video of a company president speaking about an important issue or an event that the company is involved in or perhaps a mini documentary of an ongoing project that involves the company.
When using YouTube as a public platform it is important to remember to tag and title the video appropriately in order for it to reach its intended audience and achieve the proposed purpose. It is a waste of time if a specified company video is floating randomly without a suitable venue.
YouTube videos are now even more accessible, even without looking directly on the site it is still possible to see videos linking to the search that has been typed into the Google search engine. The integration of YouTube clips alongside Google means there is another form of potential traffic heading towards the company website.
It is easy to link a YouTube brand channel to a company website and other social media sites that the company appears on; brand channels also have a bulletin section to accommodate company news. It is an incredibly successful PR communication tool that reaches worldwide.
Hi Melissa,
Completely agree, YouTube can be a core element of an online PR strategy. For companies looking to add video to their websites, there is a clear case for using the YouTube service and embedding the YouTube URL into the page. That way you get high quality streaming video on your website + the added bonus of a branded channel on You Tube at the same time for minimal extra effort. Over time you can build your video library and then look at how your other online PR activities can support this channel & vice-versa. The social bookmarking functionality on YouTube can also help increase the reach of your content.
At e-inbusiness we’re talking to Clients about taking advantage of the You Tube platform and people are starting to understand its relevance.
Video has been proven to uplift conversion online, so for me it makes sense to test the impact of YouTube presence on web performance.
thanks
james
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