In the last blog, I discussed Facebook for Business as a part of the Social or Not To Social Series. This week let’s explore the video element and how YouTube as a social media platform can help you and your business to grow successfully.

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created in February 2005 and bought by Google in late 2006. Users, both individuals and businesses can upload, view and share videos online.

Let’s explore the reasons why your business should be on YouTube?

Numbers Don’t Lie: YouTube has over 60 hours of video content uploaded every 60 minutes. Approximately 4 billion videos watched every day, out of which there are over 800 million unique visits to YouTube as stated by Statistic Brain Research.

Get Found Easily: YouTube is now the second largest search engine after Google. It is owned by Google and as a result its content is preferred with Google search results. Not only Google, but other search engines prefer video content too.

Share Expertise Effectively: When it comes to sharing your expertise, whether it is products or services, it is all about how many touch-points you can appeal to with a potential customer. By showing your expertise in a video, you get to showcase the whole package and not only the writing skills. A potential customer gets to see you in action and get the feel of the product/service you are providing.

Get Socially Connected: YouTube offers a fantastic opportunity for you to link your other social media accounts and websites. This helps you build more interactions within your network and hence increasing more touch points.

Differentiate Your Brand: When it comes to competition, what is it you or your business specifically offers that other do not provide? It is hard to differentiate if you are competing on like-to-like basis. When all your competition is just using written content, having a video will give you the ability to showcase your personality.

Improves Your Reputation: The web users love it when they find a helpful video regarding solving a problem or a video that offers practical tips. If you are selling a product, record a video about maintaining it, not only does this help the customers, it also helps you in resolving the same query over and over again from different customers, just send them the link to the video.

Easily Embedded: YouTube videos are easily embedded in a variety of places. You can embed a YouTube video on social media, blog or a website.

Track Your Audience: Like all social media, YouTube has its own analytics that helps you track the performance of all the videos you have uploaded. The categories that are included in the analytics are number of video views and subscribers; number of minutes users spent watching each video; and demographics, including country and gender, of each viewer.

Get Genuine Recommendations: You have noticed so many ‘satisfied customer’ recommendations on a company website, and thought to yourself, is it real or made up? On the contrary, if there is a video recommendation, it makes it genuine and gives your customer a feel of the product/service you provide.

In my opinion these are some distinct features that YouTube offers and should convince you to consider adding YouTube to you marketing strategy.

Are there any other reasons that should be on list? If so, do tell me.