The Youtube statistics say:
- Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
- Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
- 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
- YouTube is localized in 53 countries and across 61 languages
- In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on Earth
- Millions of subscriptions happen each day.
Considering all these, it's not a surprise the more and more people are interesting in promoting their image and brand on Youtube. You can do it also, you should, but the difference between bad promotion and good promotion is the way you are thinking it. You have to have a strategy and follow some steps, some guidelines, in order to get the best subscribers you can from this.
Channel setup and design
The first thing you should do when promoting something, as any single campaign should do, is to create something as unique as you can. Create a design that can easily be recognized and remember by your audience. Your Youtube Channel design should reflect your company site (if it exists) and description, something very search friendly. Remember: Youtube is the second most important search engine after Google - you must consider also the search, not only the videos.
Youtube also allows you to add links on your Channel. These links should go to your websites or landing pages on your sites (if you have any) and other social pages (as Twitter and Facebook, for example) for cross-promotion.
Video content quality and strategy
If you created the Youtube page just to upload one or two video that you think can are representative for you company and/or your brand it's ok. They may get some views, up to several millions if the are exceptional, but that's all. You should not expect the visitors to remember your company's name or your brand - they came for the videos and that's the first or the only thing they will remember.
So, if you want to remember your company and to establish your band you should consider the marketing strategy, not only your video content. That means you should post video often (daily or weekly basis) and to build a strategy so the visitors keep coming back to your Youtube page.
Search-friendly video title, description and tags
As I said earlier, Youtube is the second largest search engine. This means that you should treat every video you upload should be treated as a web page and you should apply the SEO rules and strategies.
- The title should be compelling, it must features appropriate keywords and it should accurately represents the content of the video.
- The video description should tell your audience what the video is about, a summary that should leave enough mystery to make people click to view it. Include relevant keywords for search optimization.
- The keyword tags should relate directly to the video and its description. You can also use the YouTube keyword tool to generate potential keywords.
- The category should be picked from the labels most relevant to your content. The video will appear in the list while the users are browsing the selected category.
Remember that all these (title, tags and description) and are indexed just like the websites, they appear as well in the Youtube search as the Google searches.
Prevent other ads from showing on your videos
It's your company, your brand. Ads from other companies may hurt your image, so you should check the box that says Prevent ads from showing in my videos on this page. It should keep all other ads from showing up on your featured video player. If you opt to have your newest video as the featured video then you’ll only have to make this selection once and it will apply to all of your featured videos.
Use custom annotations
Using custom annotations to highlight specific points in the videos ensure that the main points are clier, they keep the viewers more engaged and guide them to perform certain actions.
Select the best thumbnail
It's well known that selecting a good thumbnail (something exciting, that make people curious) bring more viewers because it make people click to see more. That's why you should select something representative of the clip, a shot that's well framed, bright and entertaining.
Make people to engage
YouTube allows comments on your videos and your Channel too. Letting them comment, engaging with them will make the users to return to your video and responde more. Youtube can be used as a social networking site like any other.
