With the importance of web video in business being stressed and publicized more than ever, it is important for businesses and professional services to choose the right site on which to post. Audience and message are key! Read the rest of this post for a deeper look into some relevant options.
Recently, we came across a website called vid4pro , a platform for businesses and professionals to share videos for the purpose of gaining exposure in the B2B community. While vid4pro may not be a household name like YouTube, we are interested to see what the future holds for this website. Currently, most people use YouTube for all types of video sharing across the web. However, with niche businesses branching off of current brilliant companies offerings in the likes of Pintrest and Instagram, a site created for only B2B videos could potentially become very successful.
What are some pros and cons of uploading your business video to a larger video-sharing site that does not focus on the B2B community?
YouTube hosts over 800 million unique visitors per month – that is a lot of potential exposure for your business (pro). However, your video needs to either be searched for or have the right keywords tagged to get the right exposure. This could be very difficult with so much competition 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute. Especially if you are a small business, you could simply get lost in a sea of content (con).
The amount of views you may get on a site like YouTube could be quite high, but think about your audience. Because large-scale video-sharing platforms host several different categories of video, there are several different motives that move people to visit. However with a site like vid4pro, visitors are there to do one thing: view business videos. The top videos on the site may only have between 200-300 views, but all of these views are from business professionals, and people your business targets directly. As BJ Fogg of Stanford University put it in an interview with Reelseo , Even if you reach a hundred people with the video, if that’s your target audience and you change their behavior, then you’ve succeeded better than if you reach a million people and you don’t change anybody’s behavior with the video.
Do videos go viral on vid4pro? Not quite yet, and we are not predicting that they will. If you are a business concerned with going viral, you may be best off on a site with more users. But most viral videos are not videos meant to be taken seriously. Ever see David After Dentist ? How about Charlie Bit My Finger ? These videos have hundreds of millions of views, but they are purely for entertainment. As vid4pro’s Twitter says, if you have a video promotion a professional service, "it should only be housed on appropriate online video platforms, such as @Vid4Pro not on YouTube next to cute cats." Keep in mind, however, there is a steeper fee to post on vid4pro.
B2B videos are not meant to be enjoyed by the masses. If you want to increase brand awareness safely on a site like YouTube, think of another way to help your brand like instructional videos for your product that the masses may actually use. Here is a good example brought to you by NBC Chicago :Ceilume, a 40-person company that makes decorative ceiling tiles, uses YouTube to educate customers on differences in quality and price in ceiling tiles. Their instructional videos have generated more than a million views and boosted sales by 15 percent — proof that videos dont need to be humorous to sell a product. Instead of focusing on being clever, focus on being relevant. Videos that engage your audience by showcasing product features or explaining a difficult concept can be much more impactful.
On which site would you rather promote your business and how?