In Yan’s recent blog he talked about pros and cons of YouTube and Vimeo to host promotional videos.  We advise the vast majority of our clients to use videos to promote their business, and post them on video-hosting sites.  Video sites are a really powerful and far-reaching medium for generating exposure, and for engaging with people, especially if you post useful information, regularly.

One of our clients recently asked us which site they should use as it was the first time they were using videos for their business.  We’ve always used YouTube, for all the reasons Yan outlined, but needed to consider Vimeo in order to help our client decide.   The questions we initially needed to ask were:

–          Who is your target audience?

–          What is your budget?

–          What do you want to achieve from the videos?

With this information in mind, we then weighed up the pros and cons for each site.  (YouTube and Vimeo have the most visitors by far so at the moment it is a choice between the two).

YouTube Pros

• There’s an estimated 450 million unique monthly visitors worldwide – it’s the number one site in terms of traffic.

• It’s owned by Google.  This makes it great for SEO.  It will increase the odds of your video being seen.

• You can set up an account for free, and customize it with your branding.

• There is no limit to the number of videos you can upload, free of charge.

• You can tag the videos with keywords.  This is again great for SEO, and in terms of increasing the chances of getting the right people to find the videos.

• Analytics are available via YouTube’s Insight tool.  The info is quick and easy to get, so you can measure how effective each or all of your videos are.

YouTube Cons

• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute – it’s very crowded!  Your video could get lost in the huge number of videos available.

• Advertising.  In order to remain a free application, adverts appear in every video on YouTube.  You cannot control which ads appear.  They could be from a competitor or a company you do not want to associate yours with, or they could just be irritating.  This was the biggest issue our client had with using YouTube, and was something we could not get around.

Vimeo Pros

•  Vimeo’s impressive reputation is based on the sites ‘quality and customization’.   With a paid for Pro account, their process makes videos cleaner and requires less bandwidth to view.

• The customization comes from the ability to embed your own logo and branding.  This differs significantly from YouTube, whose own logo appears on every video.

•  Pro account users can disable all in-video advertising.

• You can create your own groups, and organize your videos into different albums.  In general, Vimeo’s audiences are much more engaged – because they can be.

• The analytics package is widely reported as being far superior to YouTube’s.

Vimeo Cons

• Vimeo has around 17 million unique, monthly visitors worldwide, and is generally not as well-known as YouTube.  Your video may therefore, not be as widely seen.

• If you are a business and intending to host commercial videos in order to promote a product or service, you have to subscribe to a Vimeo Pro account.  This costs $199 per year.

• Some of Vimeo’s best features are only available with the Pro account (e.g. advert disabling).

• There are restrictions on use, even with a paid-for account.  There is a limit of 50gn of upload space per year, and a  cap of 5gb per uploaded video.

• If you want to exceed these caps, you have to buy an upgrade.  You need to keep an eye on the terms and conditions.

• Videos with higher views, hosted on sites with higher traffic, tend to be treated more
  favourably by search engines.  This can affect your rankings.

When making the decision between the two, you need to go back to the questions posed at the start of this blog: what’s your target audience, budget, objectives?  Generally we tend to favour YouTube, as it’s free, is great for SEO and you can measure your results.  We’ve seen some great viewing and engagement results for many of our clients who use it regularly.  If your objectives are more towards brand reputation and detailed analytics, then Vimeo may be the better choice.

Either way, using videos online to promote your business should be part of your marketing schedule.

So which site did our client choose?  Vimeo.  It was the ability to remove all adverts that swung it in the end.

Do you use videos to market your business?  If so, which site do you use?  Let us know.