After all my touting of how great YouTube is of promoting your company online they go and get sneaky on me when I’m looking the other way.

YouTube has been great for promoting businesses online because it doesn’t take much effort and expense to produce a decent video that showcases a customer testimonial, a new product you are working on, highlights from a tradeshow or interviews with key staff members.   When you post a video to YouTube visitors to the site can find your video when using search terms that match keyword tags that you apply to the video.  In addition, YouTube generates HTML code for the video that you can copy and paste to embed in your website, blog or various social media websites.

Now YouTube has added an extra “feature” – before, when your video was finished playing, it would display a “replay” button for the user to play it again.  Now, instead of just providing this replay button, YouTube also is displaying related videos that users can click to view.  That means if are a real estate agent and you post a video of some of your property you are selling in your area, another agent’s video from a competing agency might show up at the end of your video.  Or if you sell sporting goods out of a small mom and pop sporting goods store, a video from Target or WalMart might show up at the end of your video for their sporting goods department.  Or even worse, you use YouTube videos to promote your church and somehow, due to a strange use of tagging, a pole dancer video shows up as a related video.  Really bad idea from YouTube.  And worse yet, it is retro-active to all the vidoes you have already posted and may have embedded on your website or blog already.  And as an added bonus, I have found no way to turn this off in my own YouTube account.

I did a little poking around the and found some code that you can add to your embed code – however, it doesn’t work if you have a WordPress blog – I tried it myself to confirm.  Also, it is supposed to be easy for users to embed their YouTube videos on their websites – having to add HTML code to embed code to fix the issue is not very user-friendly.  Anyway, if you are up to it, here is the code you add at the end of your embedded code that YouTube provides:

param name="rel" value="0"

I’m going to continue following up on this topic and will report any updates as I find them.  Not having control over content that plays within your own site is just not acceptable.  You may want to look into Vimeo.com as an alternative for embedding your videos in your online marketing.

Interesting statistic regarding search patterns of internet users – more people are conducting more searches on YouTube than they are on Yahoo!  While YouTube is undeniably a mega-popular site now, this struck me as a fasinating stat.  Let’s be honest, did most of us even know what YouTube was two years ago?  (When I first heard about YouTube I thought I had heard it said U2 – the name of the rock band – I couldn’t figure out why all these people who normally weren’t big U2 fans where now flocking to U2’s website watch U2 music videos!)

What this means, is in a very short period of time, video became mainstream on the internet.  It also means that web surfers now have a hungry appetite for video content and are becoming more interested in watching video content than reading web pages.  And lastly, it means that a portion of your potential customers are searching YouTube instead of a traditional search engine.  And as an additional bonus point, guess who owns YouTube – Google!

What we can learn from this is that now is a good time to have video on the web.  By tagging your videos with relevant keywords, a video on YouTube could potentially net you alot of viewers.  And for those traditional searches that users are performing in Google, Google ranks YouTube videos high in their rankings, because, well, it’s Google owned and Google wants more YouTube traffic to further monitize that investment.

Now I’m not necessarily advocating you plop a 30 second commercial for your business up on YouTube and expect a landslide of new sales.  Most users aren’t searching for commercials unless they have a nostalgic hankering for the “Hey Mikey, he likes it” or other related commercials.  You might need to be creative in what and how you are presenting yourself.  Educational and/or entertaining are good starting points at developing a video that users can engage in.  But if you already have that 30 second spot left over from a TV advertising campaign, by all means, go ahead and post it while you’re brainstorming new video ideas to produce.

Call me at 1-800-709-3240 or on my cell at (352) 390-7747 if you would like to talk to me about how video can be used to promote your business.