Well, based on some Google trending it seems that Facebook has been trending downward since about early 2011. At the same time YouTube has continued a steady upward climb since its creation. It is important to know where you focus your time to reach your audience or future customers and YouTube may be the new place.
As you will see from the following Google trends report screen capture for Canada 2004-present it is clear that, although YouTube numbers are less than Facebook, YouTube will soon surpass Facebook in online interest. This will also mean a shift in the importance of where you focus your effort in reaching your audience. If you have been spending most of your time in purely traditional social networks, perhaps now is the time to move some of your effort into the video channel to connect with your audience.
YouTube has gained its share of interest through the volume of content added every minute and the viewing public who continually crave more. YouTube reports over 100 hours of video content is added every minute (Source). Just like the internet itself you have to carefully plan how to get your content noticed and know some of the rules of the road. The first things to discover are who the competition is for your viewer’s attention and the type of content that is being published.
Although much of the YouTube content may not be in your target, you are still competing for limited time of your target audience who are watching other content as well. One of the big topics of content being viewed comes from gamers. Yes, these are people playing online games and creating reviews, live action, and recorded video game action for audiences to watch.
The KING of gamers is a 25 year old from Sweden, Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, who started his video channel, PewDiePie, only 4 short years ago. In his short 4 years he has amassed over 33 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. Following is a look at his content offerings, which most likely is NOT something you will do for your business. Although you are most likely not in this space, you will be competing for your audience which most likely may be spending some time with his content.
Let’s take a closer look at perhaps some ways that Felix managed to obtain the massive amount of audience. His channel currently lists at number 5 of all channels for most subscriptions (Source) and according to another YouTube content creator The Game Theorist, who has his own growing audience, there are some clear advantages which PewDiePie has created for his channel.
The key seems to be that PewDiePie creates longer videos than most and because they are unscripted mashups of his video game playing, he produces many videos a week. Also, cited as a reason for his sudden rise to the top comes from his starting location in Sweden, however, this is very difficult to control. Of course the main thing is that his audience also enjoys his content and watches it.
As your business most likely is not in the business of creating videos, you will have to find a way to get your content in front of your audience and get them to watch it. If you look at PewDiePie’s content you will find that you don’t have to put a lot of production quality into your videos to have it watched but you do have to keep it snappy and relevant to the audience.
Also, remember that your videos don’t have to be live, they can be animations, photo collections, power point movies, etc… You can find a number of tools to help from another recent post I did about explainer videos found here. Remember, keep you video content entertaining for your audience.
The time is now to start exploring video channels for your business and to start to build your audience which you will then have the opportunity to convert over to customers.