Social Media

Video Sharing

Most companies stand to benefit from using YouTube correctly, the search world, as with the real world is currently seeing a definite trend of visitors moving towards using videos to answer their problems over more traditional search engines and static words. We should not be surprised by this, after all it was only 50-60 years ago the television entered the scene and the book industry has never quite recovered.

There are two ways that companies can effectively use videos, firstly they may wish to place products advertisements (see BMW, right) or installation videos on external sites such as youtube, veoh, viddler etc. The benefits of this are obviously the increase visibility from the users of these sites that you gain (it was reported that in January of 2009 YouTube broke the 100 million unique visitors market – www.lawyercasting.com) and the fact that you don’t need to host the video, which is beneficial if your company have some large videos and operate with a small server. This is a way are gaining brand recognition, and building brand awareness.

Another great reason to dabble with video technology is to appease your current customers, if you have a product that has a less than intuitive installation process then rather than try to explain to the customer over the phone, why not actually show them how its done, a good example of this is the video page (left) that I designed and developed for my company WarmlyYours, who specialise in electric floor heating systems. Often while on a call, the technical support team will direct customers to this page (which I set up a redirect from the subdirectory ‘/video’ for added convenience) for maters such as programming a thermostat or installing the safety siren. This is a totally different yet just as important reason to use videos and one more based around customer retention than the previous examples.

I believe that potential customers are more likely to purchase products if they feel that they have connected with the company on some level, videos are a great way to prove your company is not just a nameless corporation but a caring, happy organisation that they can trust and believe in.

As a final note if the option is available to you I believe that housing your videos in house and customizing them to neatly fit into your site, is far classier and more sophisticated than pulling a video from Youtube or Viddler, of course it’s up to you but the kind of image that you project from your website to it’s visitors is likely to prove an immensely important factor when it comes to their buying decisions.

If you wish to read about some of Youtube success stories, then this New York Times article about a man who quit his his to make Youtube videos and now earns over $100,000 a year, is a great place to start.