How Can YouTube Make Your Business a Giant Killer?

How has digital video and YouTube impacted your clients’ lives?

How do you get noticed among all the competitors and partners in your market? I’ve asked this question several times over the past several years, and get a different answer every time I ask. I’d get one common answer, but in the past it was never the number one answer. However, it did make the top three consistently. What is it? And more importantly, how is it going to impact your business? It’s YouTube and I think we just passed the proverbial tipping point. Let me share several facts that should get you running off to begin learning how to do video effectively. Here are several numbers that convinced me that YouTube can indeed change the way we live our lives and how we do business. Here are some facts to consider as you decide if your business should be using video to share your story.
• More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• 80% of YouTube traffic comes from outside US
• Millions of new subscriptions happen every day. The number of daily subscriptions is up more than 4X since last year.

These are staggering numbers. No one in a leadership role can afford to ignore these numbers. The final number I would share with you is 40% of YouTube global watch time is done by mobile devices. So how can you leverage this trend to build a more valuable, more profitable business? It’s critical that you start exploring what is happening in your market locally and globally. Video offers you a unique opportunity to interact positively with your community and markets.

I know the people who read this blog every week are many of the most innovative and creative marketers on the planet. Many have created successful businesses and lives that any of us would be glad to call our own. I have seen video help find lost children and furry family members. Video has helped my friends in the military to remain close to their families half a world away. It’s an incredible media and I think I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t help you leverage it in your business.

I did a short test last week on our sister blog at Developing Serving Leaders You can see the blog here at How Great Leaders Inspire Action  at our Developing Serving Leaders blog. We had our best traffic week on record. We added a couple thousand new people to our community in less than a week. The guest blogger was certainly exciting and the video itself ran almost 16 minutes and we still got amazing results from a YouTube video that already has over 16 million views. I got several notes from clients and partners asking how involved should they be in this new media and how should they get started. Not bad for a test. Both I and several of our contributors here feel the same way.

So what are we going to do? In a past life as an executive, I invested significant money to jump start my knowledge. This time, I’ve decided to rely on something that has worked in the past, my creativity and my search for low cost alternatives, to help me get started. I went out and got a low cost webcam and a mini tripod to get us on our way. I have access to more expensive equipment through many good partners but I thought I start small, see what I learn and continue looking to expand my knowledge of video and video marketing. I plan to take you along with me starting next week. We will have at least one video to share on each of my blogging platforms. We plan to use low cost and slightly used equipment to see how far we can go in building a strong marketing program at a reasonable cost using lower cost video alternatives. We will also share other resources that I discover along the way. If you have videos you would like to share or ideas that you have used to help grow your business drop me a line and we can add your great material to the mix.

My starting video toolkit includes a Logitech c920 webcam, an older iPad 3, a newer Samsung NP 470RSE Laptop with onboard video, and finally, a 6 year old Canon Vixia HF100 HD Digital Video recorder. We will also be using an iPhone4S and a Samsung Galaxy S4 phone to see what we can get with these older models.

Look for us to start sharing great video starting next week. Okay, I’m not sure if it will be great out of the box, but you will get a great opportunity to see how video will impact your business moving forward. See you next week.