By Lisa Hester, Senior Account Manager
At 2 billion monthly active users, YouTube is by far the most popular online source for sharing videos. Launched by Google in 2005, YouTube is accessed for entertainment, learning how to do something, keeping up with the latest news, following popular trends and more. It is available in nearly every country and more than 50 languages.
The top sites generate the most activity.
According to a recent Pew Research Center study, “The most popular YouTube channels alone posted nearly a quarter-million videos in the first seven days of 2019, totaling 48,486 hours of content. To put this figure in context, a single person watching videos for eight hours a day would need more than 16 years to watch all the content posted by just the most popular channels on the platform during a single week. The average video posted by these channels during this time period was roughly 12 minutes long and received 58,358 views during its first week on the site.”
For the study, the Pew Research Center developed a list of YouTube channels with at least 250,000 subscribers that existed as of late 2018 – 43,770 in all – then conducted its large-scale analysis of the videos those channels produced during that first week of 2019.
The hot channels are really hot.
Just 10 percent of the popular channels identified in the Pew study produced 70 percent of all the videos posted by these channels during the study period. No wonder then that the 10 percent of popular-channel videos that had the most views in this period were responsible for 79 percent of all the views that went to new content posted by these channels.
YouTube continues to grow.
The total number of high-subscriber channels increased 32 percent in the second half of 2018 and the number of subscribers to existing popular channels increased by an average of 27 percent.
As an aside, Pew found in another study a similar trend on Twitter. In that study, it found that the most active 10 percent of Twitter users create 80 percent of overall tweets.
While our brands may not be able to catch up with these mega channels, at least not instantly, there are two solid options. Pursue the use of influencers to make your way onto these heavily accessed channels (see my blog posts of 4/1/19 and 4/23/19 on the role of influencers in PR) and/or concentrate on strategies to bring your key audiences to your own YouTube channel.
Here are a few steps for bringing the right eyes to your YouTube channel:
1) Showcase what’s best about your product or service…why your product/service is the best. Share your points of differentiation.
2) Show your brand’s personality…including humor. Remember, today’s consumers are drawn to brands that show they are “human,” not just all business. Done right, humor can add an endearing element.
3) Use storytelling. Just as is true when giving a speech or presentation, you can talk on and on about your brand, even share statistics, but the most recalled portion of your presentation, generally speaking, will be the anecdotes you share…the stories that depict who you are as a brand. YouTube gives you a prime opportunity.
4) Repurpose your content. Take content you created for other platforms that resonated well with your key audiences and create videos from that content. Be aware that the most successful YouTube videos are 10-12 minutes in length.
5) SEO is king. As with any online content, search engine optimization is an important part to being found online. Make sure your YouTube videos are pumped with keywords that relate to your brand, your topic, your industry.
There are many tactics to employ to harness the YouTube potential for your brand. Let our team of experts at Rountree Group help you position your brand on this ever-growing social site. Contact Don Rountree at 770-645-4545 or don@rountreegroup.com.