Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition

What Businesses Can Do on YouTube

Remember, social media is about monitoring and participating in the conversations about companies, products, and services. And finding evangelists and influencers who can help you build your business.

Your customers are already having these conversations on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube; wouldn't you like to know what they're saying? Wouldn't you like to find those evangelists?

Here are some things businesses can do in a YouTube video, according to the book YouTube and Video Marketing an Hour a Day, by Greg Jarboe:

• Publicize a news event about your company.
• Introduce a new product or service.
• Demonstrate a new product or service.
• Distribute a speech given by the company president, CEO, or VP.
• Record celebrity endorsements of your product or service.
• Show conference presentations, exhibits, and speeches.

You can even advertise on YouTube. You can place your own ads on videos that match your criteria. It can be a traditional Google text ad or a video ad to the right of the video player. Or you can place the ad in the lower part of the video itself, as a semitransparent overlay while the video plays.

You can also create a Brand Channel, complete with your logo that gives you many more options than a regular channel. It's expensive, but “YouTube gets a Super Bowl–sized audience month in and month out,” according to Jarboe.

Yes, more than 147 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 100 videos per viewer in January 2009. That's a bigger ...