Setting Up YouTube

“What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube”

Erik Qualman, SocialNomics

“We’re still in the process of picking ourselves up off the floor
after witnessing firsthand the fact that a 16-year-old YouTuber
can deliver us 3 times the traffic in a couple of days
that some excellent traditional media coverage has over 5 months.”

Michael Fox, founder of Shoes of Prey

YouTube has gotten so big, and is so multifaceted, we had to include two quotes about it to begin this chapter. It’s hard to believe that a social computing site that is barely six years old has grown to have such influence in the online and offline worlds.

When Yakov Lapitsky uploaded the first video on YouTube, at 8:27PM on Saturday April 23rd, 2005, he hardly expected he was making history. The 19-second video shows YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim in front of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo. It has had 2,827,204 views as of this writing. And it’s really . . . boring. Nothing special. And 2.8 million people have watched it. Big deal, you might say, that’s the same as the number of people who watch the USA Network on TV every day (how did you know that?)

Consider, though, that the viewership of the oldest video on YouTube represents but the merest fraction of the 15 billion views YouTube garnered in the month of May, 2010.  As of January, 2012, YouTube was up to 4 billion views every single day.[1]

Now surely your business has a much more interesting story to tell than Yakov, who spends most of his 19 seconds of fame talking about elephant trunks. Clearly what you do is more significant than some guy’s visit to a zoo. Definitely worthy of a video.

You may think you lack the technical expertise to create a professional-looking video, and you may be right.

But that doesn’t matter. Not even a little bit.

The YouTube phenomenon has been built on poorly-produced, shaky camera, fuzzy-but-sincere videos. It almost is better to not be too slick — people tend to equate homemade videos with honesty and authenticity. Forget the lights and special effects and perfectly coiffed actors. Turn your mobile phone camera on some real people talking about your products, and you may be even more effective than slick, Hollywood-quality productions.

One of our clients paid big bucks to have an ad agency make a series of client testimonial videos. These productions had multiple camera views, tracking shots, graphics that zoomed in and out, and the clients were well-spoken and convincing.

They posted them on YouTube and promoted them on their blog. The result: Over six months the 12 videos in aggregate had fewer than 1,200 views. One video has three views, and two of them were from us. The company probably dropped $120,000 on the package, yielding an outlay of $100 per view. You’d do better handing out C-notes on street corners.

On the other hand, take the case of Shoes of Prey, mentioned in the second quote that opened this chapter. This Australian startup company makes custom — also called bespoke — shoes, and a 16-year-old enthusiast (one might call her an evangelist) known online as Juicystar07 and offline as Blair Fowler created a nine-minute video[2] extolling the virtues of being able to design your own shoes. Blair is quite the businesswoman, and she’s very much at home in front of a camera. She hosts giveaways and Shoes of Prey paid her to pitch their shoes. Her site is an example of a teen-girl phenomenon called a “haul” site, where girls post their latest beauty or fashion acquisitions for discussion.

The result of Blair’s video about Shoes of Prey was more than 450,000 views and more than 90,000 comments on the company’s site, making it the fifth-most-viewed video on YouTube worldwide when it debuted.

Small problem, though: The shoes are probably out of the price range of Blair’s followers. But they’ll grow up someday, and they have older sisters and mothers they can influence.

OK, so they got a big bump in brand awareness among people who probably are not going to become customers in the short term. Shoes of Prey could have left it at that, but they didn’t. Take a look at how they took an integrated approach to this promotion:

• They created a strategy to reach their target market — the older friends, older sisters and mothers of Blair’s 13- to 17-year-old audience — by encouraging the younger girls’ online discussions, and by requiring the girls to comment on Blair’s site about their shoe designing experience
• They changed their Website to make it easier for the girls to share the shoes they’d designed on Facebook and Twitter
• They ran searches on Twitter to find every conversation about their brand (see the Measure Results post), and engaged with the people who were talking about them
  
• They blogged about their experience
• They tweeted about their blog post, with the goal of getting the mainstream media to pick up the story (they did)
• They got retweeted by social media star Robert Scoble,[3] and more than a hundred others, resulting in coverage by lots of media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal blog

In other words, Shoes of Prey followed many of the recommendations you’ve read about in this book and they achieved a tremendous result: what the company calls “a permanent 300% uplift in sales.”[4]

One very important thing about Blair and her community: Although she is paid to review and promote products, she is very upfront with her fans about this. She has established a relationship of trust with them. They know she’s picky about what she promotes, and does not accept all offers. They know that when she’s enthusiastic about a product, it’s because she likes it.

Because she is dealing with her community with integrity, she can get away with making enough money from her venture to necessitate retaining an agent.

Blair’s able to do this because of the way she portrays herself in her videos. In the Shoes of Prey video, she suddenly stops her pitch and mentions her bandaged finger. She’s lost a nail, and she’s pretty bummed about it. But she felt she should explain and share her experience with her fans. This is pure gold. She’s Being a Person!

The lesson for businesses is not that you can succeed on YouTube if you’re a telegenic 16-year-old girl with a perky personality. It is that you can succeed on YouTube if you are authentic, trustworthy, and honest.

Facebook offers surprisingly affordable and very targetable advertisings. It’s pretty easy to get started, and you can set a daily campaign budget. Just select the Advertising link at the bottom of any page, select Create an Ad, and fill in the form. You’ll want to spend some time thinking of the ad title, since this will be one of the main elements that will attract members to click on your ad. You get 135 characters for the body of the ad, less than the limit for a tweet, so make it work for you. Get right to the point; your objective is to get a click.

You also must provide a small image for the ad. You’ll want to think about this as well. Come up with something meaningful that makes the member want to click. Don’t just go with your enterprise’s logo.

Clicking on the ad will send the member to a Website you designate. Avoid the temptation to simply direct people to the main page of your Website. It’s far better to create a special page on your site, a microsite, or a special video in your YouTube channel, to receive those who click. This page should acknowledge the visitor, possibly by mentioning where they came from, and it should also get right to the point. You only have seconds to convince the visitor not to leave. Be sure the page has a call to action.

The next section of the Advertising page enables you to target your ad to a specific subset of Facebook members (unless you’ve got tons of money, you’ll definitely want to do this.) You can show the ad by location, age, gender, relationship status, languages spoken, interests, education and work, and even by connections to one of your pages, events, groups, or applications.

For example, you could target an ad to unmarried members from New York who are in college, speak Spanish, and who are interested in clean water. As you can see from the next figure, that’s a pretty small bunch of folks.

Figure 1 — Example of a Targeted Facebook Ad Campagin

The final section enables you to name your ad campaign, set a daily budget, and select either a contin­uously running ad, or one that runs only on certain dates and times.

The last bit on the page is perhaps the most important, and it’s easy to miss. Facebook suggests a minimum bid per click, generally under $1. This is the ceiling you will pay when someone clicks on your ad.

Don’t just accept this default!

Instead, click “Set a Different Bid (Advanced Mode)” and examine the suggested range that Facebook provides. You can set the per click price to as little as one cent, but we don’t recommend this, even if you like to pinch pennies. The reason is that the advertising space on Facebook is quite limited, so your ad is competing with other ads to be shown. Facebook doesn’t say how they determine which ads are shown, but it probably involves the amount the advertiser will pay-per-click and the percentage of ads that get clicked on. If your bid is too low, you won’t get many impressions — showings of the ad. And if your ad doesn’t get shown, nobody can click on it.

On the other hand, the amount per click that Facebook suggests may be higher than is necessary to give you good response. You’ll want to experiment with the amount to determine what is best for your ad.

You’ll notice that Facebook gives you an estimate of how many clicks per day you’re likely to get for your ad. It’s a rough guide you can use to set up your daily budget, but don’t depend entirely on their number.

Facebook also offers to let you pay for impressions instead of paying for clicks.

Don’t ever pay for impressions in any Web advertising unless you really know what you’re doing!

An impression means someone saw your ad. One of the reasons you might ever be interested in this is if you’re doing a branding-oriented campaign just to get your name out there. And even then it’s generally only a good idea if the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is very small.

To compare the two major options, we recently created an ad. Facebook recommended paying 93 cents per click and estimated we’d get 54 clicks per day. We changed the campaign to pay-per-impression and Facebook recommended paying 40 cents per thousand impressions with an estimated 125,000 impressions per day. Doing the quick math indicates that for the pay-per-click campaign — which delivers 54 members to our Webpage — we’d pay $50.22 a day. For the pay-per-impression campaign we’d pay $50 per day, which doesn’t seem too bad. The problem is we have no idea how many clicks we’ll get from such a campaign. The campaign might result in the same number, fewer, or many more visitors to our Webpage, but we pay the same even if it only delivers a single visitor to our Webpage.

Because you can’t be certain of the return from a pay-per-impression campaign, we recommend staying with the pay-per-click model, at least until you’ve figured out how Facebook members are responding to your ads. You might also want to go with pay-per-impression after your pay-per-click campaign response has started to decline. This could mean that you’ve gotten the most-likely people to click and, since they’re not going to click twice, it may be more difficult to reach the rest of the audience. At that point, putting your ad in front of more people with a pay-per-impression campaign might make sense.

Whatever kind of ad campaign you select, be sure to read Facebook’s advertising help pages before embarking on your first campaign.[1] To maximize your ad spend, you should also consider doing split testing, a technique in which you test two or more variations of an ad and measure the results. There’s more on split testing in our upcoming post Optimizing for Google. Allfacebook.com has a very good post about Facebook advertising that you also should check out.[2]