Top 5 reasons you NEED to be on YouTube

A couple of years ago, YouTube was this neat little thing where you could watch some goofy stuff sent to you by your friends. Then Google bought them, and a lot of people – myself included – thought “$1.6 billion? For that!?!” Well, YouTube is a lot more than that now. And if your company isn’t there, you are missing out on a lot of potential visitors and clients. Here’s why: 1) Traffic – YouTube is now the 3rd most visited site on the Internet, only coming in behind Yahoo! and Google. With the amount of content on the site, and the number of people looking for it, YouTube is its own search engine, equally worth ranking well on. (I would certainly put effort into uploading content on your company to YouTube before I’d try optimizing your site to do well in a search on MSN, that’s for sure.) 2) Time spent – Users spend more than twenty minutes a day on the site, which is really impressive, when you consider the majority of content is under two minutes long, and none of it is longer than ten. 3) It’s free – The cost to add your content to YouTube is free. Zero. Zippo. Nada. Goose egg. The only cost is in whatever you put into making your video. 4) Cheap stuff does better – On the whole, highly produced concepts don’t do better than cheap, handheld pieces done by a couple of kids after school. In fact, with the short attention span of YouTube viewers, production doesn’t count into it at all, as long as you can relatively see and hear what’s going on. The deal breaker here is in content. If what you have to show is a perfect representation of what people were looking for – or at least really funny – it can succeed. 5) It’s great branding – Imagine you made a banner ad that people wanted to look at so much, they started sending a link to it around to their friends. If your video is just what people want, that’s what you’ll have.

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)