For all the talk and theories about how to take advantage of the YouTube explosion – few can agree whether the billion-hits-a-day site is mostly Internet TV, search engine, digital university, or social media – it might be that answer has been with us all along. That’s because, rather than thinking about YouTube as a marketing medium, it’s better to see it the way users do: as a series of channels and clips.
Some viewers go to YouTube for entertainment; others to learn, or to stay in touch with their favorite teams, shows, and characters. But what makes them so great isn’t that they are uniform (they aren’t), but that they’re self selecting.
In other words, as with Google or Yahoo, users will tell you what they’re looking for by entering in a search term or visiting a certain channel. But on YouTube, because they’re searching videos, rather than web pages, you can even more closely guess at what they’re hoping to find… and then give it to them.
If the people who are likely to find your videos seem to be searching for an informational resource, provide them with one. If they seem to want to be entertained, wrap your marketing message in something silly and light. But no matter what you do, don’t treat titles and descriptions as tools to simply reel them in. You need hits to gain attention, but you need to hold that attention before you can persuade anyone to do anything.
YouTube works best as a marketing tool when it’s treated with the same common sense as any other online medium. Remember that attention leads to action, and then make a point to give people just what they want … along with a taste of your marketing message – they’ll reward you by not changing the channel.
