It seems that video search is something many brands are including within their marketing mix, and for good reason.

You only have to look at YouTube and Facebook to see the reasons why it’s imperative not to exclude video from your social marketing strategy.  On the 2nd March 2010, the traffic stats for YouTube were up 13.23% over the past 3 month period, and 23.6% of traffic being generated from the United States, but only 3.8% from the UK.  Surprisingly, 9.05% of traffic is generated through Facebook.

So why would companies not look at investing in this form of media, seeing as its public knowledge that YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine in the world.

Through talking to both clients and colleagues, when speaking to clients about social media, the conversation rarely goes past twitter and facebook, and maybe a little blogging.  But one of the biggest audiences out there are those looking through videos when it comes researching companies and/or services.

To really pick up on this area of marketing should be the first area to concentrate on, even before those two words are even mentioned, and those two words are obviously twitter and facebook.  The reason why I say this is if you have video’s promoting your company, then that is what you can use on the social networks, it creates the spark or buzz, and gives your audience something entertaining to watch while subconsciously your embedding your brand in their mind.

But when your promoting this as a service, what do you class this as?

Many agencies are calling this video search optimisation, but why?  Once the video has been created and submitted through what ever method you prefer to use, and you’ve pointed a number of social bookmarking links to it, most of the work is done off-page, therefore this makes me think it should be called marketing, as that’s what your doing, your marketing the video itself.

So if you break it down step by step, it’s pretty simple stuff really.

  1. Create a video that clearly promotes your product or service.
  2. Upload the video to the video channels of your choice.
  3. Point social bookmarking links to the video
  4. Promote the video through social networking channels
  5. A few other tips and tricks to ensure the video ranks high and generates awareness.

Once that’s done, your pretty much sitting back and enjoying the ride, but where is the optimisation of the video, as when you come down to the facts, your basically marketing the video only.

If you have any suggestions on what this form of marketing should be called, then I want to hear from you, as this has been a on-going debate between myself and others for over a year now!