5 good reasons to use YouTube to host your videos
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When a client asks me where should they host their videos I inevitably tell them to use YouTube. Upon careful consideration, I’ve come up with 5 good reasons to use YouTube to host your videos.
First, you are using their server space and bandwidth and second and very important – YouTube is the third largest search engine on the web. Using keywords and linking back to your site is an excellent idea.
Reasons three and four involve closed captions. Actually, when it comes to videos, captioning may well be a growth area in 2009. YouTube provides a method of switching captions on when embedding the video. By adding the code “&cc_load_policy=1″ to the video’s embed code in a couple of places and it will turn on the feature. The user can control captions on/off through a button in the lower right hand corner. Using captions means that users can view videos with sound turn off.
If you don’t have your video captioned there are a number of captioning houses in Toronto that can help you. One of the better ones and less costly is my former employer Creative Post (416-979-7678 ask for Mike Menard, tell him newmedia Mike sent you).
Raeson four is translating your video to another language. Very handy here in Canada. This is handled through Google’s translation service. Google will translate your captions into the language selected by the user. There is a choice of 41 different languages. For corporate clients who have to translate videos to French this can be a life saver.
The fifth and final reason to use YouTube to host your video is the ability to link to a specific moment in the video. ( I mentioned this before – deep linking in YouTube video) This is particularly useful when referring to a video such as a ‘how to’ at a later date. Rather than referring a question to a video – you can refer them to the exact place on the video that answers that question. Add in a time reference at the end of the embedding code – “#t=1m23s” – for example, would start the video at 1 minute and 23 seconds.
Online video is becoming more user friendly, so much so you should be using video in your online marketing. It doesn’t take a full blown video crew to produce an online video. Inexpensive high end consumer video cameras produce a decent picture with sound so the creation of videos is within everyone’s reach. With user friendly features such as captions, translations and video deep linking, the hardest part of any video production will be the captions themselves. As I mentioned though, there are lots of captioning places out there and with the economy in the toilet, they may even negotiate a better rate for a web video. It can’t hurt to ask!
