Learning About YouTube

Back in my middle school days I was obsessed with YouTube. I would watch professional YouTubers like Shane Dawson, Jenna Marbles, Grace Helbig, Tyler Oakley, Miranda Sings and many others. I would even share their content on my social media channels every once in a while. After sharing one of Shane Dawson's videos on Twitter my freshman year of high school, I got a follow back from Dawson! The proof is below:

Learning more about YouTube in a marketing sense revealed a couple of insights I'd like to share with you.

1) YouTube is a Social Media Platform

In case you didn't read the very first page of the YouTube reading assignment, James McDonald makes a strong case as to why YouTube should be considered a social media platform. McDonald allowed me to look at YouTube in a new light with this observation. He points out as on other platforms, people like/thumbs up your posts/videos, viewers can comment on and share your posts/videos and they have the ability to subscribe/follow your channel so that they can see when you publish new videos. I knew all of this information from being on YouTube so much when I was younger, but I never really considered it a social media platform in the same way that I think of Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. This being said, I do agree with McDonald on his analysis of this website as a social media platform due to the rudimentary similarities YouTube shares with other social media platforms.

2) YouTube is Perfect for Marketing Part 1

If handled correctly, I think that YouTube is the strongest marketing tool mentioned in this or any other book we have read so far in this class. The social media platform (from which you can make loads of revenue off of advertisements that play before your video alone), also acts as a supporting medium. It is very common to take posts from YouTube and share them on other platforms like Facebook, Twitter or even your own blog. McDonald mentions making sure your audience is on Facebook, but even if a lot of your target audience isn't there, YouTube can still be utilized so video content can be shared on any platform the target audience chooses to use. 

3) YouTube is Perfect for Marketing Part 2

Another helpful aspect of YouTube in terms of marketing is their video statistics option. This feature allows users to check out how many views a video g received, how many subscriptions the video caused your channel to gain, how many shares it received and the feature provides a line graph which shows how much the video is watched every month. This is super useful especially when it comes to checking how effective marketing plans were, since these analytics provide all the information needed when checking reach/effectiveness of a campaign. YouTube also boasts an advertisement overlay feature. With costs as low as "$1 per day per 10 videos," you can have your videos advertised with Google AdWords. This allows your videos to be consumed at a much higher rate when they are first published, which allows for it to appear more naturally high during organic searches through website. When it comes down to it, more views allow you to gain even more views, and this is exactly what this feature helps out with.