Social Media Marketing By Video Sharing

YouTube (www.youtube.com) is essentially a web site which, by using Flash technology,
allows users to upload, view and share videos with the rest of the connected world.
These videos can range from music, movie and television clips to homemade amateur
videos and vlogs.
YouTube has 60% of all online video viewers with up to 79 million viewers in an evening
(Yen, 2008) and over 65,000 videos uploaded every day. This makes it both the premier
online video site and social video sharing site online. This implies that most video
consumption on the Web is already based on social media, and that there are over 130
million online viewers of video overall (ibid, 2008). YouTube was acquired by Google in
2006 for $1.65 billion. In fact, according to comScore data, the number of searches on
YouTube make it the second largest search engine.
YouTube is a complex site offering numerous features, yet it is simple to use. While it is
possible for unregistered users to watch most of the publicly available videos, a quick,
straightforward registration process allows members to upload an unlimited number
of clips, comment on and add video responses to them and subscribe to content feeds
that catch their attention and interest. Frequently enhanced functionality and clever
features on YouTube continually push this site to deliver bigger and better services to
its ever-increasing user base.
Many marketers have adopted the opportunities afforded by YouTube. There are two
aspects of marketing through YouTube - self-promotion of people and products such
as music videos, movie previews, interviews, video-advertisements, and sponsored
adverts, supplied by Google AdWords.
YouTube has changed the way we view video adverts. Marketers, such as BMW, have
shown that if an advert is good enough, many people will choose to watch it. BMW
has created a BMW South Africa channel on YouTube, and has uploaded many of
their adverts. One of them has been viewed over a million times since August 2006.

These are people who have chosen to watch this advert at a media cost of zero! Other
advertisers have realised that far longer adverts can be created and uploaded. As long
as the content is good, there will be viewers. Time constraints are not the same as they are for TV networks.

BMW South Africa’s YouTube success.

Savvy marketers also realise the potential of watching for organic mentions of their
brand, and then capitalising on this. An unknown teenage girl, with the YouTube
account name Bowiechick, made a 75 second video clip about her break-up with
a boyfriend. While making the clip she played with some of the effects on her new
webcam, like putting ears on her head and a moustache on her face with its facial
tracking software. Three days after uploading the video, 178,000 people had seen
this video and 900 had commented on it. The comments had nothing to do with the
break up but with the Logitech webcam she had used in the video. Following this, the
camera broke into Amazon’s Top 100 bestselling products list. Logitech were obviously
listening and made the most of the opportunity by becoming YouTube’s official partner
(Sandoval, 2006).
The medium of online video sharing also means that conferences are able to generate
a far greater audience than ever before. The companies that sponsor or run these
conferences are able to engage with a larger audience by making freely available
videos of the various sessions held. TED (www.ted.com) and Nokia’s Nokia World are
excellent examples of organisations that increase interest by making their remarkable presentations available for free.