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Great for teaching you how to use YouTube marketing to grow your business.
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Did you hear how YouTube is the new black for 2014? Review the news on it during the last year, and you can see how it rivals mobile as a marketing hot button of interest.
For example, Nielsen is including YouTube views in its rating calculations. Google announced in an earnings report that 40% of YouTube views are via a mobile device – adding to its exposure as the second largest search engine.
If you want your business to be fashionable for this trend, read “YouTube Marketing Power: How to Use Video to Find More Prospects, Launch Your Products, and Reach a Massive Audience“ by Jason Miles. Miles has written several digital media books, including a book I reviewed earlier titled Instagram Power.
I enjoyed the Instagram book, and had discovered this review copy at NetGalley with an anticipation to be “in vogue” when it comes to YouTube.
What is on YouTube Tonight?
The early chapters of YouTube Marketing Power are helpful for small businesses that have not fully grasped why YouTube and video in general is an aid for business. Miles asserts that users forget that people can comment as easily as they do on a Facebook post or Reddit thread. He notes the value of social discovery:
“When loyal fans share your videos either within YouTube on their playlists or on other social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, they help spread the news about you and your brand.”
Miles encourages the reader to comment and share video as a business strategy. This is mentioned in the book, almost with a brute force, post-everywhere tone that can seem to emphasize tactics over meaningful strategy. But the suggestion supports Miles’ viewpoint that businesses underutilize engagement to derive real value from YouTube.
People should comment on a video, not just watch a message. Ultimately YouTube Marketing Power offers enough variety of tips for any business to find an innovation to apply.
For making the most of YouTube, you’ll want to read about customizing your YouTube channel. There are unique applications to help organize things such as creating links with other platforms. That may sound as simple as adding a URL – it is – but Miles also covers value in selecting how those links are deployed:
“Instead of just pointing this website link to your top-level domain name, consider where you might want new YouTube visitors to enter your website and point the link to that destination, or “deep link” within your site.”
Miles covers the details to setting up a channel and offers good engagement-building suggestions such as hosting contests. I felt that the overviews are better at explaining YouTube usage than any blog post series or Google-provided instruction. Understandably, a book should be more functional than the examples I mention. But trust me, many fail their claimed mission — and this book doesn’t.
When YouTube Money Becomes Your Money
Even better are the sections on monetizing YouTube. I have a bias, but I am grateful analytics is included this section. The chapter that notes analytics rightly displays how strategic Google Analytics links to YouTube views can be. In fact establishing connections across social media is a consistent theme in Miles’ recommendations.
For example, read this comment about a company that spent thousands a day for building a Facebook presence but not encouraging a presence on another platform:
“They’ve spent millions, I’d guess, investing in the Facebook platform without a plan for how to integrate that effort more broadly. And if you cannot drive traffic from Facebook to YouTube, how in the world will you drive it to your online shopping cart? The answer is that you won’t.”
There are highlights of successful YouTube examples among businesses and individuals, such as Mindy McNight of the Cute Girls Hairstyles, actress Rosanna Pansino, and even Potter’s House, better known as the house of worship from famed minister T.D. Jakes. These examples may be different than entrepreneurs who typically appear on Shark Tank, but the usage is examined in a question and answer format that should yield a few ideas that you can make your own.
And then there is a discussion about the perils of naming. T.D. Jakes used the name Thepottertube instead of The Potter House:
“By the time we researched how to change our YouTube channel user name, we realized two things: (1) it wasn’t possible to change user names and (2) our channel had grown so much in popularity that we didn’t want to create a new one. Therefore we let the channel stay as is, and people seem to actually like the different name.”
A good read when researching a way to update social media plans, YouTube Marketing Power will organize your digital effort to connect with customer visually. Small business owners, solo entrepreneurs and even corporate managers will be in style this season if they incorporate tips from this book.
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