What do you need for a successful YouTube campaign? How can YouTube create a buzz around your brand or have an impact on your recruiting/sales campaigns? I wasn’t sure until recently.
About 1 year ago I caught my 3 year old daughter, pretend playing on a piano and singing Taylor Swifts “Love Story”. I grabbed the camera and took a quick clip of her performance. 14 months and 17,000 hits later I received the message “would you like to advertise on her video? Well, YES!!!
However as I went through the sign up process I realized that any copyright material can not be used. Since Taylor Swift (or her record company) own the material, we are out of luck (for the advertising side). But what I did learn was the requirements for a great YouTube campaign;
1. Original content: My 3 year old has a pretty remarkable voice (in my unbiased opinion). Although children singing is not original, her style was! It was something people enjoyed watching and was popular among the 13-15 year old demographic (turns out they watch a lot of videos and share them with friends!)
2. Get to the Point: Notice her video is 1:13 seconds and it get immediately to the point. Most people have a short attention span and are looking for information or entertainment in under 3 minutes.
3. Market to your network: I did not “market” the video. The main reason I uploaded was so our family on Facebook could view. But after many Facebook views and a few tweets….WOW. I have 500+ Facebook connections and 850+ Twitter connections, so this was a good start! Of course friends emailed it to friends and before you know it the word of web sent this 3 year old into high download mode! The key here is to have a network and share with them quality material….quality will catch on!
4. SEO: I did not know much about search engine optimization last year, but I did “tag” the video with key terms. What I have learned is that YouTube offers YouTube Insight which provides detailed information about your video, who is watching it and where they live. Read the link above and learn how to gain more traffic to your videos.
Of course most of this clings to you having a network, so if you don’t already, start building a large social network. Start with family, friends, co-workers and ex-coworkers etc….
I actually maintain two YouTube accounts, one for this blog and its audience The Social T-Rex TV and another for my kids videos Kids With Talent. Guess which one receives more visits!!
If you decide to check out the video channel that was such a sensation, you will find 3 videos and 1 may actually be a surprise about the author of this blog.
Also did you know that YouTube is the 4th largest website on the web and attracts 100 million users per month (300 million worldwide)! Great tool, be sure you include it in your recruiting plans.
