Video Marketing – How YouTube helps links, traffic and conversions?

Video marketing has the potential to bring in more traffic from sources; it can be distributed and embedded into other sites at the touch of a button and more importantly, people love looking at video content.

YouTube claim to have 20 hours of video footage uploaded every minute. With the shear amount of content being distributed through YouTube it is not surprising that in October 2006 Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion and have continued to improve the YouTube service by integrating video into their search results as well as introducing video search as a separate element all together.

With Google presenting open arms to YouTube, search engines still make up only 11% of all sources for video download.

• Search engines: 11.18%
• Social networks: 3.66%
• Social bookmarking sites: 3.19%
• Video search engines: 0.63%
• Email/IM: 0.05%
• Everything else (almost all blogs ): 80.88% of all referred traffic.

From TubeMogal.com

With 81% of video traffic being linked to by blogs it is instantly apparent that any social media campaign needs to include video marketing as a way of penetrating the social landscape. For any attempt towards a viral video the ability to saturate the blogosphere allowing embedded content to be shared across a wide range of blogging sites and platforms. Once the content is established on blogs the viral emails, social networks and word of mouth soon takes hold, these three elements are integral to a successful campaign. With the fusion of online social networks and mobile technology, the opportunity for viral content to be accessed has never been so abundant.

Smartphones are allowing video content to be viewed away from the computer allowing successful viral video to have potential exposure 24 hours a day.

How to make a viral “Viral?”

1. 1. Get under the skin of the people who view your content Find out what they like to talk about. What do they like to watch?
2. 2. Choose appropriate viral triggers. Viral triggers are the key to getting your content out into the community, what makes people tell their friends. Once you identify that, turn it up! Turn it up high! For example comedy works well!
3. 3. Make it accessible – make sure that people have different ways of accessing the content, Embed code, short URL’s, emails, downloads, mobile friendly etc. make sure that even the slowest, smallest computer or mobile phone can access the video. Don’t miss anyone out. DO this and you instantly have a chance for an internet meme.