Using YouTube Analytics to Promote a Business

Videos nowadays pervade all types of websites including news, sports, and entertainment.  Riding the wave of interest in online videos can help people promote startups and small businesses.  They are proving to be a useful tool and an important component to any online strategy.

 

There are several ways to promote a company’s video.  Entrepreneur.com recommends five: 1) promote it on your company’s blog, 2) email your list serve, 3) update your social media, 4) issue a press release and send the video to specific news outlets, and 5) advertise on YouTube.

 

Once you have started to generate a following, measuring the impact of these videos on a customer base is important to keep the momentum and interest in the firm going.  Experimenting with the delivery of the messages and potentially re-positioning them as needed could help the company find the right combination of factors that allows the videos to stay top of mind for customers.

 

YouTube Analytics is a free online tool that provides data around important metrics for videos (and is accessible after one has created a YouTube channel).  In particular, it evaluates the performance of videos and provides reports on items such as the number and frequency of views, location and demographics of your viewership, and the amount of likes, dislikes, shares, etc.  An additional innovation is that it will tell you if people stopped watching the video before it was over and at what time they stopped watching it. 

 

This tool will clearly help a person learn more about a customer base and how to be more exact with messaging when approaching them.  One might also learn, for example, about different market segments for a product of which he or she was previously unaware.  Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, it would be a fun exercise in a small environment to create enjoyable videos about a  firm or product.  This tool just makes it business-like enough to call it work.