YouTube

In short, YouTube can...

-Serve as a supportive medium, giving you content for your website, or blog. -It can be deployed for SEO, helping to promote your company or product with keywords via both YouTube itself and on Google -It can be tweaked for social sharing to initiate viral marketing

YouTube was founded in

2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, all early employees of PayPal.

Think about interactivity and be proactive and aggressive;

Actively ask for subscriptions, thumbs up ratings, and questions

YouTube has the number two search engine in the world behind Google.

As always, make good use of keywords and search terms. What are your customers looking for?

Conflicting stories have the creation of YouTube

Coming from either Karim missing a dinner party, the 2004 Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident, or a video version of Hot or Not.

Live events on YouTube:

Create an interactive environment using a third party stream to host events that help your customers feel like part of the brand

YouTube is the cable television of social media. There are niches for virtually anything if you take the time to look

Don't dismiss YouTube because you think it's not for you or your company without doing an exhaustive search first.

The more a video is viewed the more often it shows up in searches

Figure out ways to get your video viewed and you will create a "virtuous circle" of search and share

Videos get shared because of emotional content

Humor and sentimentality can help a video go viral

There are a lot of other platforms that offer video sharing as part of their function—

Instagram Stories, Facebook Live, Twitch—but YouTube is more evergreen and has more brand value

Determine which of the three YouTube strategies works best for you

Keep in mind that you can overlap

Google bought YouTube in

November 2006.

What was the first YouTube video?

Released on April 23, 2005, was footage of Karim at the San Diego Zoo

Gmail and Google+ are your ways in to setting up a YouTube channel

This will cut your prep time

Include call-to-action overlays over the course of your videos

Try to make them as unobtrusive as possible, while recognizing too many can get annoying

Many times, YouTube has tried to expand their offerings

With services like YouTube Kids, YouTube Gaming, YouTube Red/Premium and YouTubeMusic

You want quantity and quality on YouTube. You want to have mass appeal and get high view counts.

You also want your videos to be good, leading to customer interactions and brand awareness—and ultimately signups and sales.

Most of the action on YouTube occurs at the level of the video and not the channel. High view counts, sharing, and videos discovered via search usually lead right to the individual video.

You want to curate your channel, but also make sure your videos can stand alone.

When it comes to demographics and target audience, like cable television

You'll be looking more at interests and topics—with keywords—than necessarily going after an age group or slice of society; of course there are exceptions, maybe most notably with children's programming

Companies can create brand channels; like Twitter or Instagram

YouTube is easy and open

YouTube as a supportive medium can be a "way in" for customers,

a quick introduction to your business or brand

YouTube serves double duty as a social media platform

because it provides content you can link out to on other platforms as well as content that can be liked and shared in its own right.