Created in 2005, YouTube started to grow dramatically several years later with the purpose of making video accessible to others and to share them easily. It has developed since to cover large audiences while making it simple to create, develop and distribute video messages.

To help putting YouTube in context, here are some statistics:

almost 2 billion users visit YouTube every month
15% of all users are Americans and half of them over 75 years old
Americans between 18 and 24 years old use YouTube in a high proportion: 96%
YouTube videos are created across 80 world languages
the second most visited site according to Alexa, the Amazon web analysis tool
in the past 3 years, the number of small and medium business advertisers has doubled
almost three quarter of American millennial generation watch educational how-to videos regularly

Distributing and watching videos is cool, and you might ask yourself how does it help my business? For the past few years, the technology made videos not only easier to produce, but also to be stored and channel with considerable less effort. In a survey from Facebook, almost two thirds of its consumers state that watching a video made them purchase the item. Although previously it was thought that a video could bump up only the engagement rates during the advertising campaigns, it’s now proven that they can also significantly contribute to closing the sales.

You can share these videos effortlessly through social media, email and websites because their location, or web link may be embedded in other websites.

Once you watch a video on YouTube, the platform displays a number of videos that YouTube recommends to you due to the interest you’ve shown by watching the initial video. Each video might have comments area available where the viewers share their opinions about it, and the video owner can make it public for everyone or private to a selected group.

You can use YouTube for business to track data about each video you upload, with YouTube Analytics tool which reports information such as:

how many views originate from each referral sources
how many comments and ratings receives each video you upload
in which countries the video has the most views
which are the groups by gender and age who view them the most
information about events which occur for the first time such as: the first referral from a YouTube search or from a related video, or the first time the video is embedded in another site

You can use YouTube to create a YouTube channel which allows you to do the following:

upload all your videos related to your company
describe your business
link to your contact details or to your website
organize your videos by type and topic in playlists
provide a web address of your channel which you may distribute to your customers or place on your website

If you want to do targeted advertising to promote your video to specific locations, and demographics by topics and interests, YouTube has a paid advertising feature you can use.

As the largest video sharing platform, YouTube continually grows and redefines itself. Recently they’ve announced important changes to improve communication, dissemination and publicizing of information which could significantly change the structure of the audiences throughout YouTube with the mention that they actively develop this area to create positive growth. To get more details, please visit our website, contact iQWeb at hello@iqweb.ca or call 1-877-99-IQWEB.