Using Social Media: Integrating Video into your Website

Have you decided to integrate social media into your company’s website marketing strategy? If not, why not? More American consumers than ever are tapping into a variety of social networks and talking about the things that they love, and companies can and should take advantage of this. One of the easiest ways to begin using social media is to get involved in the social video network YouTube. 2 billion videos are played every day, and the YouTube community is one of the most active online networks on the web.

Here are two ways that you could use YouTube to bring increased sales to your business.

1. Build trust in your business.

In these tough economic times, consumers are being more selective. Consumers look for a company they feel they can trust. In the past, they would get a referral from friends, family, and colleagues.  Today, consumers also turn to friends and colleagues they may have never met in person, but are connected to through social media or a virtual office, to get a trusted referral.

An easy way to build trust using social media is to provide a friendly face that people can associate with your company.

Look at the success of the Geico gecko, the lady in the Progressive commercials, or Jared from Subway commercials. Think about the good feelings about these companies, because you associate them with friendly-looking people/animals.

Your company can achieve the same effect using short YouTube videos that put a friendly, passionate, trustworthy face in front of your potential customers.

2. Generate widespread exposure

Not only can you begin to gain a depth of trust of consumers with YouTube, you can also spread your network of contacts, using YouTube.

YouTube is designed so that users can easily talk about and share the videos that they like. Helpful, educational, informative, humorous videos are more likely to be shared. A shared video increases your exposure and drives more traffic to your website

Videos don’t all have to come from you or your company,  Hold a YouTube video contest, where your website visitors make short clips highlighting your product or service. Not only will this help your visitors feel connected and valued by your company, they will be the ones generating buzz and sharing your company with all of their friends.

What you say about your company on your website won’t have nearly the impact on your visitors as what others are saying about your company on the web. Using social media, especially YouTube, gives you an excellent way to encourage people to say great things about your company’s products and services. And it is these referrals that can lead to some of your best customers.

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