With the grand unveiling of the redesigned YouTube last December, 2012 is the perfect time to ramp up your viral video strategy.
While the changes were met with uproar from a characteristically vocal hardcore YouTube user base, they actually offer ripe opportunities for brands.
According to Social Media Examiner, there are only three major changes to get to grips with, so here we go:
1. Redesigned home page
If you’ve logged in to YouTube since December, you’ll have noticed its slicker-looking home page. At its heart is a prominently positioned “Subscription Feed”, replacing the previous trending videos – and much better news for brands.
What this means for marketers: As viewers view, rate and comment on your latest viral video, their followers and subscribers will in turn be exposed to your content. No longer will brands have to compete with cute baby and hilarious kitten clips. We expect this move to create a more relevant, if smaller, viral effect.
How to maximise the change: Be consistently active, posting fresh content to YouTube weekly and use calls to action to drive rates, comments and shares of your videos.
2. New channel page
As well as looking different, YouTube channels are now more likely to feature on search results pages for related keywords. More »
YouTube has launched a new function that allows viewers to see what are the most viewed/liked/subscribed videos this week/month and all time. YouTube Charts also happily alerted us to this surreal bovine dance from Brighton based freelance animator- Cyriak, which is number one this week with 4 million+ views.
Ahead of all the pop videos in the last 7 days, this goal celebration is the number one viral video worldwide, 10+ million views and 125K Facebook shares.
YouTube has announced a film project in collaboration with Ridley Scott & The Sundance Film festival to make a movie created from public video submissions.
YouTube describe the “Life in a day” project as: ‘a historic cinematic experiment that will attempt to do just that: document one day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world.’
The Conservative party has circumvented the ban on party broadcast advertising during election day, booking the main ad unit on YouTube’s home page from midnight to 10 pm tonight, when polls close.
The party aims to harness the emotive power of broadcast media to influence UK YouTube viewers, estimated by ComScore (Feb 2010) to be streaming 88 million videos a day, though how many access the site via the home page remains unknown.
The move is also calculated to block any of the other parties from similarly hijacking the ‘YouTube vote’.
“Our YouTube homepage ad on polling day lets us take our message of change to millions of people – ensuring we’ll be the only party reaching a mass audience online,” a spokesperson for the Conservatives said.
Online video views in the UK are up 37%, climbing from 4 billion to 5.5 billion views, according to comScore’s latest video matrix report.
YouTube continues to be a chief driver, with Google sites overall up 17%, though comScore has noticed a trend towards longer format video viewing in the UK, something also seen in the US, with views of BBC sites, for example, up 143% on last year.
“In particular, we’ve seen eyeballs move towards the online channel to watch more long-form, professional video content, such as popular broadcast network TV shows” says comScore director Mike Read.
Some marketers are keen to exploit the growth in video viewing, Reckitt Benckiser, owner of brands including Nurofen, Finish & Calgon is doubling spend on online video to $40 million this year, according to a report in Ad Age.
Iconic ’70′s aftershave Old Spice, continues to dominate Ad Age’s viral video charts with positions one and four, while their creative agency, Wieden & Kennedy are also authors of the very clever Tiger Wood’s Nike ad at number two. NMA’s UK viral chart has the latest, ‘Will it blend?’ at the top – ipad version. Here’s all four for Friday:
Chad Hurley, one of the founders of YouTube predicts that the next five years for the site will be all about “stickability” and convergence of channels.
In order to encourage people to stay on the site for hours rather than minutes, he says, “we need to create a much more seamless experience across devices.”
Interviewed in The Telegraph, Hurley says “People think about the world of TV and the world of online video as being different ways to distribute video, but what happens when every TV is connected to wi-fi with a browser? What does that mean for your distribution opportunities? And these budgets dedicated to digital online – that proportion spent on video versus the big dollars that are being spent against TV – what happens when those worlds collide and is it just one thing? That is what we envision.” More »
With the grand unveiling of the redesigned YouTube last December, 2012 is the perfect time to ramp up your viral video strategy.
