How can YouTube add to your social media strategy – some benefits and useful tips for your business

YouTube is the world’s largest video channel. Visitors can watch and search for videos in a database that includes almost every subject you can think of. Although most of the videos are still user-generated, ever more businesses start to upload professional videos to the platform taking advantage of the possibilities for brand impressions available on YouTube. So how can YouTube add to your social media strategy? The main benefits that the channel offers to your business are the following:

• Through the use of video you can build brand awareness
• You can drive targeted traffic to your company’s website
• YouTube’s embedding script is an easy solution to uploading your videos you or any other video to your own website
• Videos on YouTube often start an online conversation

All around the world people are using YouTube to find relevant information, so if you’re planning your social media campaign, consider including YouTube. It will drive targeted traffic to your website and at the same time it will help your business get good rankings on the search engine result pages. Do you want to know how it will help you get good rankings? Read the following tips:

1. Register and brand your own YouTube channel – in case you don’t have one yet, it would be wise to create one and give it a name that is related to the industry you’re in. You can brand your channel by adding the company’s logo, uploading a background image, adding a title, description and tags, etc.
2. Upload your video to YouTube
3. Embed the video on your website – in terms of SEO Google cares about how often the page is viewed, so embedding it on your website will help you boost that number
4. Embed your video on pages with text – as videos are converted into Flash by Google, something that search engines still have difficulties with understanding, the surrounding content is really important. If you write an introduction to the video and put this before the video on your website, Google will get a better understanding of what the content is about.
5. Match the video title and description to keywords – the title of the video is the most interesting to Google, make sure the title and description match the keywords you want to rank for. It is much easier to rank extensive keywords than generic keywords, so be creative.

Taking those remarks in mind, integrating the video channel in your social media strategy YouTube will add to your social media strategy and bring along many benefits. Every month, over 800 million unique users visit the video platform to find relevant information. Take advantage of this enormous amount of prospects by sending out your company message and attract potential customers to your website.