We all know about YouTube; the giant free video sharing portal. To say the audience is humongous is an understatement. There is also the less famous but admired and respected free video sharing portal called Vimeo. Some of you have probably never heard of Vimeo, but they are also a colossuses in the free video hosting and streaming world.
Both Youtube and Vimeo have their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to presenting your personal and business’s web videos to the www. What YouTube lack in style they more than make up for in audience clout. And what Vimeo lacks in YouTubes’ reach they more than make up in their video quality and niche community / audience.
One of the most watched user generated videos on YouTube – over 340 million views!
We at WildWeb often get asked by our clients to embed videos onto their websites. When we do we have to decide to either go with the market penetration of YouTube or the stylish and professional feel of Vimeo (You can load your videos onto both – but when it comes to embedding the video you have to go with one or the other!). If you had to ask us personally which platform we prefer, handsdown, we would grin and say Vimeo (on a Pro Account – about R200 bucks a year). This is purely because of their embedded videoplayers flexibility and awesome streaming quality. It allows you to customise the player and embed it as if it was designed specifically for your website. Oh, and unlike YouTube you do not get those annoying adverts popping up mid frame!
The slick Vimeo player and video feed – what a treat!
However, in the real world of business and bottom lines, if you had to ask us what video streaming portal we usually upload our clients video onto, we would grit our teeth tightly and hiss ‘YouTube!’
Essentially, you upload a marketing video because you want to send out a message to as many people as you can. This is where YouTube is king! Uploading a video to YouTube and titling and tagging it correctly literally powers your videos hit rate – thanks to YouTubes Google powered search.
Having taken the time to look at our own YouTube (and Vimeo) channels and analysing the performances we become increasingly aware that we should be encouraging our clients, who are geared into marketing their brand, to create their very own YouTube channel and manage their videos and content for themselves.
YouTube comes with a detailed traffic report allowing you to track all your videos and audience penetration. Couple this with your websites reporting and you can put together a detailed strategy going forward.
Some of the reporting that you should be looking into is as follows:
o Your website traffic though AwStats or Google Analytics to where the vide is embedded
o Your YouTube video reports via their registered reporting
o Your Facebook fan shares and their interaction with your media
o Tour Twitter followers and the number of re-tweets of your media
If you do not own your own YouTube channel and looking to broadcast a message via the web’s top streaming medium get onto YouTube now register your personal channel. For further reading check out this blog describing YouTube’s nifty insight tool.