Ever thought about having your own YouTube Channel? Want to know why so many people, organisations, and brands have one? In this blog post I’ve outlined the top 7 reasons for their use:
1. Popularity
For most Internet users, video content has become a essential element of the web browsing experience. According to a recent comscore survey, 32.5 million of the UK population are collectively watching over 5 billion online videos every month. That’s 166 videos a month (or between 5 and 6 a day). Unsurprisingly YouTube accounts for more than half of these videos (BBC iPlayer video content comes in a distant second).
2. Getting Discovered
YouTube is the world’s second biggest search engine behind Google. People use it to find and view entertaining/ interesting video content. It hasn’t taken long for content creators to wake up to this fact, they are using it to get themselves discovered to great effect. Rightly all wrongly, all that is needed is entertaining and interesting content…and perhaps a bit of luck!
3. Thought Leadership
The most popular YouTube Channels feature compelling web video content. By and large, YouTube channels that publish this type of content can develop a significant following. Some of the most successful YouTube channels have thousands of subscribers. In many ways, these YouTube channels have established their owners as “thought leaders” in a particular niche.
4. Search Engine Rankings
Video content is playing an increasingly important role in the search engine results. Video content that has been uploaded to publishing channels such as YouTube frequently appears on page 1 of search engines such as Google. These videos attract a lot of views and traffic for the sites that they promote. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, YouTube can be a fantastic way to do this.
5. Going Viral
YouTube encourages its users to share video content with family, friends, and colleagues. Social media icons such as Facebook, Twitter, Email, and G+ are all featured underneath each YouTube video. These social media icons are one of the main mechanisms that enable YouTube videos to “go viral”. They make it easy for YouTube users to share content with other people.
6. Ease Of Use
Setting up a YouTube channel is very easy to do, literally anyone can do it (it requires no technical expertise). The user interface is very intuitive both from the viewer and publisher’s perspective. That said, I’d expect nothing less from Google.
7. It’s Free
YouTube channels are absolutely free to set up and maintain, so it’s no wonder they’re so popular with content creators. 1 view or 1 million video views, it makes no difference, YouTube/ Google covers all of the costs associated with hosting and streaming. Naturally there are costs associated with content creation itself, but YouTube/ Google are doing their bit to make sure there are no barriers to publishing it.
Agree completely with this list. I think the one thing I would add is that video content really does encourage social interaction (much of these feeds into your mention on viral potential). People engage with videos on social media channels incredibly well, which in turn can have a knock on effect for your own social presence which does not play a part in search engine rankings.
So the search engine benefits of Youtube are two sided.
Fab post!