Social Media Marketing Through YouTube

In this article, we will see how Youtube and other video sharing sites, have changed the way all marketing is done on the Internet.

Social media is playing a vital role in online marketing. A few years back, online marketing was limited to email marketing, banner advertisement and PPC campaigns. In the past five years, Google established a new web standard for web developers, webmasters, web designers and Internet marketers. This standard is called web 2.0 and after the creation of Web 2.0, several companies jumped into the Internet with their innovative ideas like: social networking, video sharing, slide sharing and many others. However, the motto of the webmasters remained the same. They not only needed to promote their websites, they wanted to make their websites visible in all major search engines. Their main targets was nothing but increase sales and generate more leads, no matter whether they had a large website or a small affiliate blog.

What Is YouTube And Why We Need It?

YouTube is a video sharing site from Google. Initially it was developed by another group of people, but later on it was acquired by Google and was integrated with their other services to work under the same account. As mentioned earlier, 10 years back there was no existence of video sharing sites available in Internet and hosting videos was very expensive because bandwidth was not a cheap resource back then, also videos where very hard to produce because there was not hardware available to help users produce video easily. After the invention of the web 2.0, the concept of video sharing took its place. Youtube is not just like a simple video sharing site, in YouTube people can create his/her own channel, upload and share videos, web masters can embed Youtube videos in their websites and Blogs and viewers can post their comments on videos. Our second question is: why we need it? The main reason is because if a picture is worth thousand words, a video could be worth 1 million words and express the idea or concept easier.

Apart from the Yahoo video and MetaCafe, YouTube has its own features and user base. Usually, nearly 60% or more user traffic comes into a website from all major search engines, but what's about the rest visitors? Where they come from? Well, some of them come from article directories, bookmarking sites and many other places. But unfortunately, now a day link directories, book marking sites are losing their importance and people are more addicted to social networking platforms. That is why Internet marketers are penetrating on social media marketing and performing their promotional activities on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and other video sharing sites. Probably you already read some articles on the Internet that say something like - "Increase your YouTube visitors in 24 hours" or "This software can magically increase your YouTube views!" keep safe distance from those articles and malicious software! Many of these offers are scams and sometimes break YouTube rules. Using those software and black hat techniques can permanently ban you from YouTube and YouTube may remove your videos from their site. Always remember, there are no shortcuts for success. For example: If you are into affiliate marketing, you should select very carefully your market preferable using affiliate software and promote your videos like you promote your website or blog. Proper keyword, niche, short precise and informative video definitely could get large number of views.

Commercial Intent

The success of your entire video promotion depending on your viewers; i.e. how many people view your videos, their contribution/suggestion about your videos and the commercial intent of these viewers. You could get 1 million views of a video about a dancing cat, but you probably will earn nothing if you promote dog food. For example: I created a video about Hostmonster Scam and the idea was to get this video to show up in the search engine results page (SERPS) with the keyword: Hostmonter Scam and although the video has few views, it resulted in some sales, because the commercial intent is strong since people that are typing this thing on the search engines are already prepared to buy the service.

How Videos Get Popular

The increasing numbers of viewers ensures your video's popularity. If you write about something technical in your blog/website, then you can add a video for your content and you need to promote your blog to get visible in the search engines. Similarly, you also have to promote your videos in several places like - question answer sites (Yahoo answers for example), forums and other Blogs, so that other bloggers and visitors can watch the video and leave their comments. This method is also applicable for promotional videos too. If you don't have enough time to promote your videos, then you can hire a professional or buy some "views" from them. They have organic methods to generate more traffic towards your video. But to do so, you have to spend some money and make sure that those professional use only "white hat" techniques to increase your video views. If you are a starter, then it is suggested that you must take advice from experts or professionals to increase your YouTube visitors. Once you generate some YouTube video views, other viewers will notice it and watch the video and if they found it useful, then definitely they will refer other visitors to watch that YouTube video.