Youtube is something I have used a little in the past for business and it’s a great tool. Your videos are on the web forever and most videos you make will never get outdated. Imagine having a TV ad campaign that just never stopped running!

Below are Gigaom.com‘s 34 ways to use YouTube (and other video hosting services) for business.

Expertise and Thought Leadership

1. Upload recordings of presentations you’ve given, to demonstrate authority and public speaking skills.
2. Share slides from presentations that weren’t recorded.
3. Create short videos of valuable tips of interest to your clients and prospects to show off your expertise.
4. Conduct an interview with an expert.
5. Turn your podcasts into videos, to expand your reach.
6. Engage with the YouTube community by leaving comments and uploading video responses to videos on topics related to your business or industry.
7. Enhance your videos using YouTube’s special features, such as annotations, audioswap, insight, language options and quick capture. Also see what’s cooking in the YouTube Biz Blog and TestTube for more  upcoming features.
8. Record an important meeting to share with employees, shareholders and others, as appropriate.

Marketing and Advertising

1. Set up a channel to reflect your brand and engage with others. Here’s an example from The White House.
2. Choose a user name that reflects your brand for your channel URL.
3. Add your channel URL to marketing collateral and social network profiles.
4. Post customer video testimonials to add to your credibility.
5. Put together a creative video explaining your product or service.
6. Show your product in action using movie trailer-style: fast, creative and catchy.
7. Show the results of someone using your services.
8. Promote your events using recordings of previous events.
9. Introduce your staff to add authenticity.
10. Take viewers on a tour of your offices and city to help them feel connected with you.
11. Ask others to use your product in their videos (like product placement in movies) and cross-promote each other.
12. Post links to your videos on various social networks.
13. Look into YouTube Promoted Videos to reach your target through contextually-relevant search results.
14. Use Google AdWords on Google Content Network, which includes sites like YouTube. These use text-based ads and don’t require a video from your business. Research the Placement Tool to identify the best placements for your ads.
15. Earn money from your videos by entering into a partnership with YouTube.
16. Run a contest.
17. Add Call-to-Action overlays to your videos to drive traffic to your web site.
18. Study your channel’s performance with the integrated Google Analytics and YouTube Insight to make the most of your videos.
19. Display company information in every video including name, URL, phone number and email address.

Customer Service

1. Create “how to” videos to help your customers use your product or service.
2. Post solutions to common product or service problems.
3. Answer customer-specific questions using videos. Imagine how surprised a customer will be when you point them to a video with the answer!
4. Embed videos on your web site on appropriate pages, including customer support and product tours.
5. Post a blog entry discussing a problem and include a video for visual support.
6. Go the extra mile by adding closed-captions or subtitles to your videos. Remember that not everyone can watch or hear videos in the same way.
7. Show a work-in-progress project to a customer for review and approval, without the need for a face-to-face meeting or in-person demo.

All these are just ways you can use Youtube on your own channel. I have advertised on other peoples channels via banner advertising as well as running my own videos. Not all of these may apply to your business but using just a few will show notable results.

You may not generally think Twitter is a great marketing tool at first. It’s not just for following friends and celebrities and more and more businesses are using it just as they are using Facebook. The difference between Facebook and Twitter is that with Facebook you advertise to others and they come to you and they like your page or join your group. With Twitter you can make the first move without spending a penny. You can make thousands of people aware of your existence straight away and even target people within your niche or interested in your niche to follow you. How do you do that? Simply by following them first.

You only want to follow people who are interested in what you’re selling and these people are very easy to find. There are two ways of finding them:

1. Following the followers of market leaders and competitors in your niche – Imagine being able to walk into your competitors business and asking them for their client list or asking the for their email list. They would laugh in your face and show you the door very quickly. You can however with just a few clicks find everyone who’s following them on Twitter. Simply find the Twitter page of your competitor or someone else within your niche and you’ll see the number of followers they have. Clicking this figure will bring up the list of followers. All you have to do is follow them and wait for them to return the favour. I found you  usually get about 30% of them following you back. Twitter only lets you follow 1000 people per day and 2000 in total unless you get more followers yourself but this will still give you a few hundred followers straight of the bat.

2. Follow people who are talking about your niche or market – The search function on Twitter will not only let you search for people but also what people are talking about. By typing in keywords for your niche you can find exactly who are talking about it and you can follow them. Again you’ll find a good percentage of them will follow you back.

Once you have followers you can start tweeting updates for your business and website. As I mentioned in the last article I will do a whole piece about what to write in your updates to keep people hooked.

Lets start with the big one. I don’t need to tell you about Facebook. Whether you love it or hate it’s no doubt the biggest social networking website ever and more and more businesses each day are using it to reach out to new and existing customers. How? Well first you’ll need to create a page for your business. About 99% of all pages on Facebook are those annoying ‘likes’ we’ve all seen them. The other 1% are usually businesses.

To create your own the best thing to do is to like a page, it doesn’t matter what it is, then visit that page and you’ll see some links down the left hand side. Click the ‘Create a Page button’ to get started. Next you will want to click either ‘Local business or place’ or ‘Company, Organisation or Institution’ and then type in your business details. The local business option is great if you have a physical location for your customers as well as an online presence. Next up just follow the steps for adding an image, inviting friends and filling out some basic information and your page will be ready.

Next up you need fans. As you would have just seen you can invite your own friends to like your page which is a good start but they are not likely to be new customers. The best way to increasing likes on Facebook is with Facebook adverts. You may have seen some already on the right hand side of your news feed, underneath the ticker. At first you might assume these are expensive but they really aren’t. I personally only spend £7 a week on Facebook adverts and receive about 40,000 impressions and 100 clicks. You may decide to spend more than I do and will of course receive even better results.

It also helps to have a Facebook link or like button on your website. I will do a future article about linking all the social networks to your website as well as one about what kind of updates to do on your pages to keep potential customers interested.

Detailed Guide about Facebook Adverts and Creating Pages and Groups

So you may be wondering why I’m jumping straight into the world of social networks and media instead of the more traditional advertising methods such as Email Marketing, Google Adwords, Directories etc. Well I will cover all of those eventually but Social Media and Social Networks are huge at the moment and they are also very easy and also enjoyable for businesses to make the most of. You may know what I mean when I talk about social networks and media but if you don’t then I am talking about websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. I will also be looking into blogs and forums.

Facebook and Twitter are great for businesses in completely different ways. My next few articles will explore getting started with these websites and in later articles I will show you ways of using them for your business to generate interest from potential customers. Youtube is not as widely used by businesses but online video is on the increase and youtube provides a great service to get your videos out to the masses.

Blogs and Forums are also great places to get your business out there. As I said in a previous article, people use the Internet as an information tool but they also like to voice their opinions and blogs and forums are great for this. Forums also build up great little communities within your niche which you can use to enhance your reputation.

The next few posts will be exploring all of these in more detail and showing you how to get set up on them and how to get likes, followers and subscribers quickly and easily.