As the world’s second largest search engine and the second most visited website after Google, YouTube is a powerful platform whose dominance continues to grow. Online video is growing exponentially, with over 4 billion videos viewed daily. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has further increased the platform’s growth, as more people turn to watching video online while living in lockdown, consuming unprecedented levels of media.
According to the we are social & Hootsuite report published in January 2020, YouTube was the second most used social platform, losing out only to WhatsApp.
Despite its huge popularity, many supply chain, transport and logistics companies ignore this platform – and are losing out on opportunities to grow their brand. Here are just six reasons why your company needs a YouTube channel:
1) YouTube’s Traffic: One billion people visit YouTube each month, 100 hours of video are uploaded every 60 seconds to YouTube.
2) It Helps Get You Found on Google: With Google’s Universal Search, videos, images, news, books and local searches are blended together in Google’s search results, so as to provide the most useful information for people searching. Nowadays videos appear far more often in Google’s search results – a clear indication that Google considers videos to be as important has text-only pages.
3) Your Content Lasts Forever: The beauty of video is that it can be re-purposed into podcasts, infographics, blogs, articles, presentations and even video series, without the need for you to spend a lot of time or to invest in expensive equipment.
4) Demonstrate Your Offerings: Because YouTube is both visual and aural, your organisation can easily show how its products/services work. You can provide a step-by-step breakdown, which increases your credibility – viewers are more likely to become clients after watching your video.
4) Grow your Email List: By using software that allows you to embed your sign-up form directly into YouTube videos, a video can be stopped temporarily for a viewer to enter their email address and subscribe to your list, before they continue.
5) Videos have Higher Conversion Rates: Some research suggests that video content is 12 times more likely to be watched than text is to be read.
YouTube is a powerful, engaging platform which will continue to dominate social media platforms. Organisations that do not leverage this opportunity will miss out on valuable opportunities to grow their brand and engage their audiences.