YouTube and online video

The camera really is your friend YouTube is the worlds’ largest online video platform, through which users can view, upload and share video content, free of charge. It is owned by Google.

Whilst technically a search engine (the second largest after Google for that matter!), YouTube is usually referred to as part of the social spectrum, and yet it’s most common benefit to business is the way it can breathe life into a website. In short, it just makes everything that little bit better.

For who

• Everyone

Benefits

Authenticity - YouTube is all about real content from real people. This authenticity is critical to your social presence and these online videos will do a better job of communicating your personality than any written word or image.

Spread it far and wide - When you’ve published the video on YouTube, why not incorporate it into your Facebook Fan Page, LinkedIn profile and blog? Embedding a YouTube video onto your website or blog is just a simple copy and paste.

Video to enhance the website - You will notice that often when you make searches on Google they show videos at the top of the results. The only reason Google and the other search engines give the videos such prominence is because they believe users value video content highly. They are not wrong. If you present someone with a block of text and a video, both with essentially the same content, the vast majority of users will opt for the video every time!

Tip Top Tips for creating video

• Camera – If you really want to keep costs down then you can begin with your webcam, but for just ВЈ100 you can pick up a Flip HD and for another ВЈ20 you can have a tripod. The other thing you may want to consider is screen capture. This allows you to record what is on your screen, similar to how ‘print screen’ takes a picture snapshot, screen capture takes a video! Camtasia is good but pricey. I’d suggest starting with a free trial on Jing at http://www.techsmith.com/download/jing/

• Editing software - There is a lot of great editing software out there but if you’re counting the pennies I’d suggest starting with Windows Movie Maker.

• Hosting – We already mentioned the Search engine optimisation benefits of hosting on your site. It can also look more professional than having a third party logo. The downside is that it takes up valuable space, can greatly increase the load time of the page (the time it takes for all the content to appear) and can be a little awkward depending on the structure of your website coding. Embedding from YouTube on the other hand is easy peasy, the load time of your web page is not affected and it won’t cost you a penny!

YouTube Actions

Embedding – learn how to embed video from YouTube. This is going to be really important for your blog. Just click on the “Share” button under the video, then click the “embed” button and you’ll see the embed code appear. Copy and paste this into the html box of your blog and you’ve just successfully published your first online video!

Get kitted out – Buy a Flip HD and a tripod, and download Windows Movie Maker. The first shoot may take half a day’s messing about but you might just surprise yourself with the end result!