YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine with more than 3 billion searches a month. YouTube is bigger than Bing, Yahoo, AOL and Ask combined, yet many companies are not leveraging YouTube to its fullest potential.
YouTube has 1 billion unique visitors each month and if your company does not have a YouTube presence you could be missing out on a major opportunity for brand exposure. But with over 6 billion hours of videos watched each month and 100 hours of videos uploaded every minute there is a lot of noise to get through to get your brand heard. This is why it is important to have a strategy that makes your channel stand out among all the others. Here are a few tips on how to get the most out of your YouTube channel.
Set realistic Goals: It is important before creating a YouTube channel to set goals for what you want to accomplish with it. You cannot simply create a channel and hope that you get the exposure you are looking for. Decide on what you are looking to get out of your channel. What are you looking to showcase? And most importantly how do you want your brand to be perceived?
Have Content Ready: Make sure you have at least 5 videos planned out before launching your YouTube Channel. Decide on what you want your videos and other content to focus on. Do you want to show “how-to” videos to help your clients, do you want to feature different products you offer? Another helpful tip is to get on a schedule so that subscribers know when your next video is coming out and can look forward to its release.
Make it visually appealing: Videos are the main focus of a YouTube channel so make sure your videos are visually appealing. Organize your videos into a playlist and think about what would be useful for the users. Make sure your thumbnails are clean and representative of the content in each video. Most importantly don’t forget to tag your channel and videos with relevant keywords so they are searchable.
Cross promote: Once your YouTube Channel is created and looks the way you want it, make sure to promote it across all your social media channels. Feature your videos on your Facebook, Instagram Twitter and even your company blog. Not only will this create more traffic to your channel the combination will create and overall brand synergy and increase brand awareness.