Many companies today are considering using video as a way to engage with their customers. This makes a lot of sense for the following reasons.
- Tell your story in a growing platform. Neilson Ratings estimate that as of 2014, 90% of all of our web traffic will be video. This may seem aggressive but consider this: video remains the most compelling way to tell a company’s story. It’s a great platform for communicating with potential customers. In addition, with the rise of the smartphone and other mobile, your customers can connect with you anywhere. Video can take your company’s story to wherever your potential customers are and give you an edge over your competition.
- People would rather watch the Internet than read it. If you think about it, the Internet has succeeded over the past 15 years despite the fact we’ve had to read everything. Now that we can watch it like a television we would rather watch it than read it. The largest companies in the world have already jumped on this growing trend. According to a recent study by Burson-Marsteller, the amount of YouTube videos Fortune 100 companies are producing on a monthly basis actually exceeds the number of blogs they are posting. The average Fortune 100 Company is creating and posting ten YouTube videos per month versus only seven blog posts per month.
- Maximize Search Engine Optimization. Another advantage of why video should be part of your social media content strategy is the search engine optimization impact. You’ve probably noticed when you do searches on Google today videos are among the top-ranked results. There’s a reason for that. BusinessWeek published an article in 2010 about how video is 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google than any other type of content. According to BusinessWeek, your video will give you another opportunity to rank well on the largest search engine in the world. Therefore, having video as part of your social media marketing strategy, you’ll be attracting customers from YouTube, TVs and mobile devices across the globe, as well as Google. No other media has that kind of reach.
Here is an example of a client of ours who produces at least one VLOG per month. Each time Omegasoncis publishes a blog we optimize it on YouTube. We also write a summary blog and add embed the video. As a result, they dominate the search results for important search terms. In the following example, we are competing with over 100,000 other web pages. As you can see we were able to produce two above the fold 1st page listings on Google!
This video was produced by SmileTV https://www.smiletvgroup.com/video-production/
If you want an opportunity to show up in the No. 1 and No. 2 search engines in the world, you have to use video. It’s the only way you’ll get a good ranking in YouTube and it will help you out quite a bit over Google. Because YouTube is the second largest search engine, there are more searches conducted at YouTube than Yahoo or Bing, and there is less competition which is a huge opportunity.
Consider these search results as evidence of the power of YouTube to get your business noticed.
- Search for “what is CRM software?” At YouTube, only 5000 videos show up. If you go to Google and do that very same search, you get over three million pieces of web content that you’d have to compete with. If you are a CRM software company, wouldn’t you want to have a video that was titled and tagged “what is CRM software” so you’d have a great opportunity to rank extremely high for your targeted audience?
- Search for “how to make salsa.” Only 5400 videos pop up for that key phrase in YouTube, but 30 million pieces of content show up over at Google. I don’t know about you, but I think I’d prefer to learn how to make salsa by watching someone rather than reading a recipe.
- Search for “best surround sound systems.” 2100 videos pop up on YouTube versus six million pieces of content on Google.
If you haven’t started making videos to tell your company’s story, you need to seriously consider creating videos that people want to watch because the importance of video will only grow over time.
