• YouTube videos are 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google results than a text page
• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the U.S.
• As of February 2011, visitors were spending around 2.9 billion hours on YouTube per month

When you look at the facts, YouTube optimization makes a whole lot of sense. To get you started, here is a great video series that covers everything you need to know about YouTube SEO.

Content Optimization:

• Start Building Content: You should be creating a portfolio of content on YouTube. Plan to build in video with your normal campaigns. But video production is so costly, right? Wrong. All you need is iMovie and an iPhone to start creating content. If that’s too much to handle you can try one of the many screen share tools, an online slideshow creator, or a text-to-video service like xtranormal.

• Keep It Relevant: As you begin creating content, ask yourself this question: “Will this be useful in three months?” If the answer is no, it’s unlikely that your video has real replay value. Try to create content that will be relevant in the future… think long shelf life.

• Do Your Research: Before you begin making videos, do some keyword research using YouTube’s keyword tool. This will give you an idea of which videos will be successful. As an example, if you search “NBA” in Google, you’ll get results on players, news, and game scores, etc. If you search “NBA” in YouTube, many of the top videos will be about dunks, brawls, and highlights. This is a clue that a dunk compilation will likely do much better than a player profile video.

• Competitive Research: Do a normal YouTube search for some videos that are similar to the content you want to create. What is already working? What do people seem to like? What is most popular?

Metadata Optimization:

• Optimize Metadata for Video Search: Your metadata can help you appear in searches and gain traffic, but your content has to be good to experience true success (surprise). However, a well optimized video can help your visibility. Optimize your video title, tags, description, and category to appear in searches. Remember, YouTube search works differently than normal search engine results. If you need some clues, go back to your competitive and keyword research and see which video titles are performing the best. There is a great explanation of metadata here.

• Thumbnails: YouTube thumbnails are automatically chosen near the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. As you create content, plan to have something visually interesting happening at one of these points. Most people will only have a choice between these three thumbnails, so pick the most visually interesting one. In the case that you are a YouTube partner, you can upload whatever thumbnail image you would like.

Video Promotion:

• Leverage Existing Networks: The obvious thing to do is promote your videos on your website, email newsletter, and social networks. Take advantage of any platform where you have the ability to post a video.

• YouTube Promoted Videos: YouTube promoted video ads allow you to target your videos to specific keywords and pay for views. As a bonus, when you run promoted video ads, YouTube allows you to create a call-to-action link on your video, which can be used to drive traffic to another site. There is a great tutorial on how to do this here.

• Annotations: Use annotations on your other popular videos to drive traffic to newer videos. This can easily be done through the YouTube Annotations tool.

• Link building: In many cases, over 40% of views on your videos will come from sites outside of YouTube. Create a plan to reach out to bloggers and other sites, and build embeds of your YouTube videos.

YouTube Community:

• Channel Design: Spend some time on your YouTube channel. A blank YouTube channel is much like a blank Facebook page. Create a color scheme, upload a background, and organize your playlists, subscriptions and other modules.

• Moderation and Response: Keep a close watch on the comments that happen on your videos and your channel. Be sure to answer questions and respond to comments quickly. Treat these folks like you would treat visitors to your other social pages.

• Engage Fans: Videos with more ratings and comments will appear higher in YouTube search results. Within your content, you should encourage fans to rate, comment, and subscribe to your channel.

A few months ago, Room 214 worked with one of our clients (I’m not naming the company for competitive reasons but they are in the real estate industry) to create a series of promotional videos to be used on their website, blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Since we also manage a Google advertising campaign for this client, a logical place to utilize a small advertising surplus was with a one-month YouTube advertising “test” campaign. I call it a test because no one at Room 214 had ever tried a Promoted Video campaign on YouTube and, while we were optimistic that the campaign would work well given the visual nature of real estate, had no real benchmark in mind for what the results would be. It went well – we decided to allocate 20% of the monthly advertising budget moving forward to YouTube – and I walked away with a few learnings that may help you get your YouTube promoted video ad up-and-running.

First of all, I recommend that you consider a YouTube promoted video campaign if your company fits this description:

1) You already have a Google ad campaign (if you don’t have one, I recommend you make that your entree and consider YouTube as a supplement down the road)

2) Visual appeal has a direct impact on sales for your industry

3) You currently have or have plans to create a library of existing appealing video content (You probably don’t want to advertise the first video you put up on your YouTube channel – more on that in a sec)

If your company fits that description, keep reading. If not, you may want to look more closely at social media and search marketing.

·      A YouTube ad will, obviously, drive more views back to your YouTube channel so you’ll want to make sure that your channel’s up to par and that you have plenty of content/information available (re point 3 above). Create several videos and put them on your YouTube channel. Promote them via social networks, your website, blog, etc. Use audience feedback and YouTube insights to make an educated decision about which video resonates best with viewers and drives the most traffic back to your website and use that video for your ad.

·      The video you use should be entertaining and engaging. Don’t get too caught up with trying to make your video professional quality or overly marketed. You don’t need every line of the video to contain a keyword or marketing message – you need the video to be engaging and interesting so viewers will watch it and want to learn more. This is YouTube – some of the most successful viral videos have been amateur videos – this doesn’t need to be overly produced, shot on an expensive camera or cost a ton of money to show some ROI. If you’re not sure what I mean, check out Mashable’s list of the Top 20 YouTube and Video Memes of All Time.

·      When you create the ad, make a killer headline. The format of the ad is a still of your video, a 25 character headline and two 35 character lines of copy – so you need to make every word count.

·      Use keywords and linking in your video description, utilize tags and add annotations to point out what you want viewers to see/know during the video.

·      Create a Call to Action Overlay (they’re free with a promoted video campaign) so that, once you’ve driven potential customers to your video, they know what to do next and can become a customer.

·      Engage with viewers on your YouTube channel. You’ll see an increase in comments (ours increased about 300%), messages and ratings as well as views to the video – so be sure to interact with individuals who reach out to you.

·      Do a test run. I initially limited our campaign to one month and $3,000. Before you commit a large sum of your advertising budget to anything (in this economy?!) it’s a good idea to gauge if/how well promoted videos will work for you. During this limited-budget timeframe you can prioritize keywords, adjust bids and determine whether you want to allocate budget for it moving forward.

·      If you DO decide to move forward with a YouTube ad beyond the test-run phase – keep checking back with YouTube. This is a new ad platform for them so they’re making tweaks and updates that could potentially improve your campaign. Stay in the know and give it a shot!

1. Old-school measurement for ROI: What is really a “lead?” People want to apply same measures to social media. Traditional measures are being applied to social media marketing when so many other aspects of business simply don’t. Example: What’s the ROI of the receptionist, or even the accounting department for that matter?
2. We can measure how many people are exposed to our ideas, downloaded our YouTube video, etc. but these are very different measurements compared to traditional ROI measurements.
3. David states that ultimately, the ROI argument is used as an excuse based in fear. Many companies are simply afraid of social media.
4. David’s new book, World Wide Rave: How ideas spread and why people talk about you and your company. The first step in the formula for success is very counter-intuitive to marketers: Nobody cares about your products except you. To create something that has potential to spread, you can’t talk about these things. As soon as your product is brought into the equation, nobody cares.
5. Key take-away: Doing lots of activities in online marketing as opposed to one or just a few, should be the expectation when it comes to increasing your chances of success.

Notes: You can check out David’s blog at WebInkNow.com. I really enjoyed this interview, and am looking forward to reading his new book.

Personally the most interesting line in Marshall’s post was the summary of The Financial Times article on the belief that the shortage of marketers skilled in negotiating sites like MySpace and YouTube is one of the biggest barriers to the growth of advertising online.

We can attest to the truth behind The Financial Time’s position, as the largest and most sophisticated brand and marketing agencies are getting stumped on how to enter social media sites. We are seeing a sharp increase in curiosity and questions about how to capitalize on the growing popularity of MySpace and YouTube, and a lot of that interest comes for large established brand agencies that are use to dropping a few million on traditional main stream media campaigns.

Sure there are companies and people right now setting up clandestine marketing programs in MySpace, hoping their message will go viral. But our perspective lies in leveraging the deep niche interest areas of the site that bring people together because of shared passions. It’s one thing to make a funny video and see it spread like mad through YouTube, it’s another to reach out to a particularly small group of people that have chosen to communicate with each other because of like interests and provide something of value to the conversation.

Reaching out and spending time communicating with small niche groups is not a skill set most marketers are good at. In social media the idea of marketing needs to be replaced with the idea of having a conversation. Buying your way in doesn’t cut it – you need to actively join and participate to gain credibility and confidence from your peers. Hmm, sounds a lot like real life doesn’t it? Maybe that’s why it scares people.

As the popularity of online video grows, you can expect truckloads of advertising dollars to come rolling in. Online video is arguably the most compelling medium for advertisers and as always the challenge will be targeting the right audience and alignment with appropriate content. Advertisers will also be challenged with thinking of crafty new ways incorporate product placement and promotional campaigns into user generated content.

As high speed broadband becomes more standard and the quantity/quality of content improves, the line between my TV box and computer monitor will definitely continue to blur.