This is a guest post by Umair Maqsood, an Internet Marketing Specialist who runs a Tech Blog. He loves writing about Internet Marketing and Technological updates.
What do Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga have in common?
YouTube!
Justin got famous thanks to YouTube and Lady Gaga holds the record for the highest number of views on YouTube. Social media has become a tool of great importance – especially YouTube – and not just for popularity.
The video above was produced by Rhett and Link – two of the funniest and most popular video marketing producers you will find. Examining what they do will improve the videos you make – and you DO want to be producing videos or hiring someone to do it for you. Keep reading for YouTube basics plus advanced tips to get more views.
Notice that in the above video, the URLs at the end stay on the screen long enough for you to actually go to the links – unlike most videos where you have to replay the video repeatedly if you actually want the links offered.
Some or most of you might have noticed the Kony 2012 campaign and publicizing this event to such an extent was only possible because of social media and especially YouTube. The last presidential elections and the 2012 Presidential Debates were also given a boost with the help of social media. It would be impossible to count how many issues have gone viral and impacted individuals as well as the masses with the help of social media.
What is YouTube?
YouTube is the world’s most popular video sharing website, and the second largest search engine. It not only allows users to share videos with the world and each other, but it also has social networking features that allow users to be friends with people with similar videos or tastes, send them messages, and share videos with them by in-boxing them.
What Can You Find on YouTube?
The clips and videos that are shared via YouTube include:
- Movie clips and full length movies.
- Music of all kinds including original songs, and soloists and bands performing well known music. (These are known as “covers” when they are performed by anyone other than the original artists who made the song famous.)
- Humorous videos including entire stand-up routines of famous – and not so famous – comedians.
- Important causes people want to raise awareness about.
- How-to do just about anything from gardening to cooking to building completely self-sufficient off-grid communities.
- Anything you might want to buy – including this awesome super-fast, power saving ViewSonic 27 inch LED rotating monitor every blogger should have to speed up their work and save their eyes.
- Online diaries and general videos from anyone’s life.
This exceptional International street musicians video periodically goes viral AGAIN on Google Plus and elsewhere.
Check this video out and you’ll see why it has 45,325,683 views (45.3 MILLION views) as of today – and that number will keep climbing!
Marketing on YouTube
YouTube can be used to drive traffic towards your desired target Web site by creating a video with content created specifically to appeal to your target market.
Since, this social media tool is free, everyone can use it for their own personal or professional purposes – as long as what you produce is legal. For YouTube to be effective for the sole purpose of driving traffic towards a website, the video content should be highly useful.
A good example of it would be the YouTube channels that share DIY (Do It Yourself) videos on a regular or weekly basis. Such videos are useful not over a long period of time – what content marketers and bloggers call “evergreen” content – because users will be interested in the topics indefinitely.
Videos are a good way to teach do-it-yourselfers because they can be watched as many times as desired until to learn what is being taught.
In the same manner, marketers also use YouTube to share information to help their targeted audience, in hopes to get them to click their link in the video’s description. 93% of the marketers use social media for business; however, the point of social media is not whether to do it or not, the point is, how social media is used for marketing purposes.
One of the best ways to do marketing on YouTube is with humor.
Here is the excellent example that Gail used in her post on How to Do Viral Marketing.
How to Use YouTube to Get Hired
Thinking outside the box is a very useful way of finding new ways to utilize social media tools for different purposes. One good example of it would be the London Symphony Orchestra, which held open online auditions – YouTube auditions to be precise in order to form the first ever YouTube Orchestra.
Winners of this online audition were mostly amateur musicians who were later invited to New York in April, 2009 to participate in the first ever YouTube Symphony Orchestra Summit and play at the Carnegie Hall.
Imagine having your YouTube videos achieve stats like these:
- 71,830 subscribers
- 37,586,317 video views
That is over 37.5 million views!
Video stats aside, the 90 players of this orchestra were chosen from 30 different countries. This just goes to show how powerful this social media tool can be, if used properly for the right purpose.
Social Media is About People
Anything and everything that someone, some people, or a group of people can relate to can and will be viewed millions of times and this is not just a fact about music videos alone. The number of general videos in categories such as funny, humor and day to day alone account for millions of videos on YouTube, which have billions of views. Gossip, reviews, tips, social experiences, and anything in between that is in the form of a video, can be shared on YouTube.
Future of YouTube
The amount of traffic that is generated by social media and how these tools are being used to gain individual and organizational benefits is worth noting. If you are worried about the future of social media, don’t be, because the future of social media looks really bright for the next five years and with websites like, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn etc, there is hope for individuals and marketers alike.
NOTE FROM GAIL: If you liked this post please share it and follow Umair and his blog on Twitter: @UmairMaqsood and @Tech_licious and visit his Tech-licious blog. [Notice it is @Tech_Licious on Twitter with an underscore and there is a dash in the blog URL.]
Gail Gardner
Your youtube Article is Wonderful ! For viral marketing it’s good…
I will follow which you provide us. Waiting for next post. Thanks.
Great post!
Youtube is definitely the future of internet marketing. Nowadays people are less likely to read anything anymore and they are choosing the video format as well. Many marketers are taking advantage of it and my prediction is that in the future you’ll see much less Blogs and much more Video Blogs!
I still love to read though…
Art