HOW TO MAKE YOUTUBE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING TOOL

How To Make Youtube The Best Social Media Marketing Tool For Your Business?

The basics of making Youtube your social media marketing tool

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you already know that Youtube is a social media channel/search engine for sharing video content. That means you need to be ready to produce video if you want to utilize it. If you aren’t ok with that, you need to find someone to produce videos for you,or just do it anyway. Before you start shrinking into the shadows at the thought of being on video, realize that not all videos have to be close-ups of you or even have you in them at all. For many businesses, the ideal videos range from testimonial videos from customers, to how-to videos showing your computer screen the whole time, or slideshow videos that showcase your best products or talents. The best way to get started if you aren’t used to making videos? Just get started. We have a whole series of videos called “Get the Idea” that were recorded in mass while working abroad, using construction paper as a green screen background. No joke I used the drawer on my hotel nightstand to hold the microphone. You don’t need production quality video to get started making Youtube a powerful marketing tool for your business. Here’s what you do need:

UNDERSTAND THAT YOUTUBE IS A SEARCH ENGINE

One mistake that many businesses make when starting out marketing through Youtube is that they forget that Youtube is the number one search engine in the world. It is also owned by the number two search engine in the world, Google. That means it’s not just about putting up entertaining videos, it’s about helping the search engines understand what those videos are about so they can put them in front of the right people. In this case, the right people are people who will use your business services. This means when you put up a video, the description is important, the tags are important, adding links to your website and other social media channels is important.

That also means like other search engines and social media networks the algorithm is judging the quality of your content. If people aren’t watching more than a few seconds of your videos, if nobody is liking them or sharing them, and if nobody is subscribing to your channel, you will get moved to the back of the line. That’s where nobody sees your business. You don’t want that. Create engaging content, give it a keyword rich description, and share it with the world every chance you get, and Youtube will reward you as a very effective marketing tool for your business.

Finally, this means that creating quality content on YouTube the right way, can help everything from your SEO to your reputation management online. Paired with the right Google My Business category and listing, YouTube can be a very powerful tool to make sure that you control what people see first when searching for your business online. One of the other reasons YouTube should your social media marketing tool of choice.

HAVE A PLAN FOR CREATING CONTENT

Of course, you are going to make 20 videos a day, every day, rain or shine, just like everybody else does…right? If you don’t have a content creation plan when you are using social media networks as marketing tools, you have a plan to fail. Social media networks are supposed to be social.  That means you need to regularly engage with your customers, leads, and even critics on them if you want to be successful. Starting a Youtube channel, adding three videos, and then never coming back is the equivalent of leaving the closed sign-up and the lights off at your business 24 hours a day. If someone finds your business on a social media network and it hasn’t been active in years, at best they will assume you aren’t relevant, at worst they will think you are out of business or lazy. Everyone has a phone that can make videos these days, there’s no excuse for not making regular content, but I promise if you don’t have a plan, you will manage to find excuses. Create a plan you can stick to, or someone you delegate it to can stick to and then do it. Even if the content isn’t good (our Get the Idea videos are sometimes downright awful), you will get better just by doing it regularly, I promise.

HAVE A PLAN FOR SHARING YOUR CONTENT

There isn’t a lot of point to making content nobody will ever see. It always amazes me when I see people posting daily, or paying someone else to post daily to a social media channel that gets literally zero engagement. While it’s important to keep an active presence online, it’s more important to keep an engaging presence online. In the beginning, that means annoying your friends and family, existing clients and customers, and other people in your industry to get their support. As your content gets better, your following gets bigger, and the search engines start to notice you more, you can be less annoying. The other side to this is that if nobody sees your content, you don’t get feedback. Yes, for some of you that sounds great, but it’s not productive. Feedback is what makes your business and your marketing improve and grow. Get out in front of the world!

RE-PURPOSE ALL OF YOUR YOUTUBE CONTENT

The really great thing about videos is that they are easy to repurpose. A ten-minute video can easily be turned into 5 two minute videos highlighting specific topics, one long and two short blog posts, several gifs, a short podcast, a new cover video for your Facebook page, 10 Instagram and Twitter videos, and a ten minute Facebook video. Do not share your YouTube videos on Facebook, upload them directly. Facebook and Google are the big dogs in this arena, and they fight like it. Sharing content from YouTube on Facebook is a really great way to see your Facebook page tank. Take advantage of the transcription tool on Youtube to convert your video to written content. From there you can easily edit it into those blog posts and long Facebook posts. Back to the whole search engine thing, if you want to show up number one in Google for basket weaving, posting your basket weaving video to Youtube, then sharing it in your blog post about basket weaving on your website that links to your social media pages with a lot of posts about basket weaving, is a really good start. Re-purposing your content makes that much easier and more efficient.