Telling a story is one of the most engaging ways to introduce your brand to customers, and there are many available media outlets that can help you accomplish that. There is no better venue for story telling than YouTube. In fact, people between the ages of 18 and 34 spend more time on YouTube than they do watching cable. As cable becomes less appealing, more and more people flock to YouTube every minute, making network television less appealing as a marketing platform. Here are a few reasons why YouTube matters for brands:

Creativity Speaks

There are so many different routes that a company can take when creating a video. Many YouTubers have done an Ignite Talk, creating a five minute presentation to slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. This is a quick and compelling way to present a topic without losing the attention of viewers. Because these videos are so short, viewers will likely finish watching the whole clip and may head over to your website to learn more afterwards.

Social Media Integration

One of the best features YouTube offers is social media integration. This makes it easy to share your company’s videos on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Sharing videos on social media is imperative to increasing brand awareness and optimizing your brand’s SEO, as it helps your target audience find your content. Since YouTube is owned by Google, their videos pop up near the top of almost any Google search. If your video is named intuitively and includes the right keywords, you‘ll help it gain exposure to a larger audience.

YouTube is Huge

Still not convinced that YouTube’s the best platform for your content? Considering that they have one billion active users every month (Yep, you read that right), this means literally half the internet is visiting this site. With that many active users, the probability of your video reaching your target audience is pretty high, provided you load it with solid content. Even a small portion of those one billion viewers becoming customers sounds pretty amazing, doesn’t it?

Going Viral

If your video goes viral within the first 24 hours of uploading, then you can expect to rake in millions of views. For example, when Samsung released their “Evolutionary Husband” video, it reached 1.5 million views in an hour, and within a month, it hit 10.7 million.

Here’s another example. Remember “Gangnam Style” by Psy? Did you ever hear of Psy before the video? Would you have even cared for the song if you hadn’t seen the music video first? A musical artist from South Korea used YouTube to tell his story, gained popularity for his brand, scored a ton of views, and achieved international awareness. In fact, his video for “Gangnam Style” currently has 2,065,108,386 views. The opportunities are endless with such a large, diverse audience hungry for content from around the world.

Simply put, YouTube is necessary for increasing SEO rankings and growing awareness for your brand. You may be up against some heavy competition, so focus on making your content useful (or at least hilarious) and shareable. You never know, your video could be the next YouTube sensation.

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