Where brands could be going right on YouTube

How could brands further increase their subscriber share, the author went onto ask? Well ‘content’, of course, better content must be the answer. 

The problem

The problem with this approach is that it implies that brands should be involved in an arms race to dominate the ‘Social Media Rankings’ in the first place, competing for number of Likes, number of Followers, number of Subscribers, etc. But the reality is that these are merely vanity metrics and this is not how brands – particularly Publisher brands – should be using Social Media at all. 

The solution

The key to successful social media usage, and in particular video, is to integrate content directly back into your own website, and use multimedia channels to augment existing content and make it better. This approach – rather than farming content out onto external platforms – will draw eyeballs in to the branded website, which is where of course they can be monetised in the form of advertising, subscriptions, customers, data, etc. 

The final hurdle

The final hurdle that brands often face in operating in this way is that it makes it more difficult to measure. At least by sending all of your traffic to YouTube you are getting an unambiguous representation of subscribers and views on the channel. 

However, there are ways to monitor the success of social media campaigns through your own analytics channels, and this is in fact a better way of doing things. 

YouTube is a good one because it allows the exact same content to be viewed wherever it is found online, be that on YouTube, your website, Tweet-Deck, or wherever, reaching multiple audiences. But this obsessive quest for ‘off-site’ metrics has stop. If Brands and Publishers are to get it right on YouTube they must focus on using videos across their entire content portfolio, not simply pushing people towards their YouTube channel.

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