Monday, March 25, 2013

YouTube in Digital Promotion



 I’ve never been a habitual YouTube user. Of course, I’ve watched music videos and seen the occasional ridiculous video on people trying to swallow cinnamon or pranking their friends. Though there is something new I’ve begun to encounter and it almost seems silly that I didn’t give much thought to it before. YouTube can be a great promotional tool for all kinds of businesses and organizations. 

They offer free video hosting, allow you to put your video on any webpage through html links, so organizations can use it as an easy way to teach consumers or put video advertisements online. And many do. I found a water fountain making company that used it as a place to host commercials and instructive videos that were linked on their site. 

Coca-Cola uses YouTube and puts the video on their main site too. They had a pretty cute video with young people (college kids) working together to make creatively engineered projects to “share a coke.” The video was funny and very relatable to people my age and younger who are still in school. Coca-Cola is a huge company that has found a way to use YouTube to its advantage. 

So what are the advantages of hosting a video on YouTube compared to just using a video player on your own site? Well for one, YouTube is free whether you’re a kid making funny videos at home or a huge company according to an article titled "YouTube vs. Self- Hosted Video: pros and cons for webmasters". Another is that you don't have to be tech savvy. YouTube will take care of that part. You don’t need to know anything about html coding or servers and if playback speed is slow or something is wrong with the server, YouTube deals with it, not one your employees. It also has a huge audience and fast playing video. A disadvantage would be that they play ads before your video, can delete it at any point because of complaints or law violations and you can lose customers to videos displayed on the panel next to yours. Visit Instantshift.com to get more information on the pros and cons of YouTube hosting.

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