YouTube: An Excellent Way to Reach the Professional Tradesman

youtubeAre you looking for ways to get in front of tradesmen? If you’re a manufacturer and don’t have anything on YouTube, you’re missing a great opportunity. What better way to show a customer or prospect how to use your product, highlight features and benefits or even have a customer testimonial.

Next to Google (who by the way owns YouTube), YouTube is the highest searched. The numbers are staggering:

  • YouTube has 1 Billion unique visitors each month and sees four billion video views every day.
  • 1 hour of video is uploaded every second – that’s 60 hours a minute!
  • Users on YouTube spend a total of 2.9 billion hours per month (326,294 years) watching video.
  • integrated into Google Results.

When considering content, here are some suggestions. Tell the story first and don’t worry about the length. Shorter is always better and you should focus on the first 15 seconds. If you get their attention, you have a better chance of them viewing the entire video. They need to determine up front that the video will help them. When telling a story, your goals are:

  • Engage the customer
  • Educate the customer
  • Make points of differentiation
  • Entertain customers
  • Be different

Rich Brooks in Social Media Explorer explored ways to maximize your YouTube presence. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Create compelling content – Address the needs of your customers.
  • Make it findable – both in and out of YouTube. Your Title, Description and Tags are important.
  • Brand your channel – Create a custom background that goes along with your branding . Use “Player View” as your layout and select autoplay feature.
  • Post a bulletin and alert your friends and subscribers – Create a link and put it on your home pages.
  • Leverage other social media platforms – Blog about it, Tweet it, post it on Facebook and submit it to StumbleUpon.

What are you doing to leverage your YouTube videos?

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Is Your Brand Disconnecting on Social Media?

Hopefully everyone has jumped onto the social media bandwagon in some sort or fashion. But lot’s of B-to-B companies are struggling with how they approach this new media.

A recent article in AdAge by Noah Brier sums it up,“In a nutshell, they need to act less like brands and more like people.” You need to teach your brand to speak. Brands are not people, although their companies are made up of them. Most companies are driven by the traditional results orientated model of ultimately doing something that results in a sale.

A recent article in Social Media Explorer by Mark Ivey titled, Why Brands Can’t Connect, brings home issues that companies must address to insure the brand’s success in the social media arena. Here are some highlights:

  • Don’t be concerned with the mechanics of doing 10 tweets a week or 3 posts a day to your Facebook account.
  • Traditional marketing doesn’t work in the social setting.
  • Stop thinking like marketers and start thinking like creative humans.
  • Think about “What keeps your audience up at night”
  • You need to understand that social means your ability to engage your reader, not preach to him on the features and benefits  of doing business with you
  • Brands typically have a narrow focus while people tend to look at the bigger picture

Noah Brier sums it up very well:

“So what’s a brand to do? For starters, brands can learn from the best publishers on the web, like Huffington Post or Gawker/Gizmodo. These outlets combine small amounts of stock content with large amounts of flow content. The former is used to attract new audience and the latter to keep them engaged. To achieve this, brands need to start thinking about their inputs, or who they pay attention to, as much as their outputs, how they look, act and talk. They have to think of their channels less as CRM and more as owned media.”

The big question is how are you doing?

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Manufacturers: Are You Maximizing Your YouTube Presence?

If you’re a manufacturer and don’t have anything on YouTube, you’re missing a great opportunity. What better way to show a customer or prospect how to use your product, highlight features and benefits or even have a customer testimonial. Next to Google (who by the way owns YouTube), YouTube is the highest searched. The numbers are staggering:

  • In May of 2011, there were 15 BILLION videos streamed.
  • Internet viewing was up 35% and mobile viewing up 20%
  • 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute

I recently read a post by Rich Brooks in Social Media Explorer that explored ways to maximize your YouTube presence. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Create compelling content – Address the needs of your customers.
  • Make it findable – both in and out of YouTube. Your Title, Description and Tags are important.
  • Brand your channel – Create a custom background that goes along with your branding . Use “Player View” as your layout and select autoplay feature.
  • Post a bulletin and alert your friends and subscribers – Create a link and put it on your home pages.
  • Leverage other social media platforms – Blog about it, Tweet it, post it on Facebook and submit it to StumbleUpon.

What are you doing to leverage your YouTube videos?

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How Are You Generating Social Media Leads?

Hopefully one of your objectives for social media is to generate new business leads. Obviously one of the ways is to be more active. Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or your blog, you need to be visible and active in order to create followers.

Social Media Explorer shared some interesting stats on new research that bigger may be better. Here are some highlights:

According to Hubspot and Edison Research, the more frequent you post on your blog, the better the chances of getting leads. According to them, a blog has a shelf life of around 72 hours so it makes sense that more is better. It’s like anything else –  it’s a numbers game, the more you do, the better chance of catching someone’s attention on a topic that’s relevent to them. While it may not be possible to post each day, the more frequently you do, the better your chances of generating leads. The key is consistency.

frequency vs acquisition

The same holds true for Twitter. According to Elijah Young, those of us who have over 1,00o followers saw 6 times as much traffic to their account.

twitter reach and leads

Facebook fan pages result in better results. According to Hubspot, fan pages that have over 1,000 fans have 22 times the amount of traffic.

facebook reach and traffic

Additionally, the size of your Facebook fanbase will dramatically impact how many leads you receive. Businesses with 501 to 1,000 fans saw 4 times as many leads as those with 1 to 25 fans, and businesses with over 1,000 fans saw 12 times more leads. For tips on growing your Facebook fanbase, see this popular article by Mari Smith called 21 Creative Ways to Increase Your Facebook Fanbase.

facebook reach and leads

So what are you waiting for. The more you do, the better the results!

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Using Social Media to Market an Event

When doing an event, from a press conference to an open house or a new product launch, are you using social media to capitalize on it? Social is an inexpensive and cost-effective way to enhance the buzz around what you’re doing. I’m not suggesting that social replace traditional methods, instead use social to enhance them.

I recently read an article on Social Media Explorer.com by Rich Brooks on 12 Ways to Market Your Event with Social Media. Rich makes some good points and here are some highlights:

  • Before the event – Market your event through Twitter. Even consider your own hashtag in all your tweets. If the event is large enough give it its own Twitter account. Use Facebook Events to attract fans. Use LinkedIn groups you belong to to promote the event. If you have a blog, use it to promote it. Forums, talk up your event and its benefits. Tell them about the agenda, speakers, etc.
  • During the event – Use those hashtags to make your event more findable and searchable. If it’s a local or regional event, use Foursquare and Gowalla to promote it by announcing the event, link to a registration form, give updates. If you belong to Forums, talk up the event and its benefits. Live blogging from the event, let people know what they are missing. Share video and photos – a picture is worth a thousand words.
  • After the event Blog about highlights and possibly interviews with attendees. Post similar comments on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and ask for feedback.

These are some great tips. What are you doing to capitalize on social?

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