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Video sharing has grown beyond belief over the past few years, particularly the past 12 months. YouTube being the biggest in the UK with sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The youth audience (Digital Natives typically aged between 16-24) are the biggest users of these sites and as it becomes increasingly difficult to engage youths with brands, user generated content sites could provide compelling viral marketing campaigns.

YouTube has overtaken Wikipedia to become the UK’s most popular social networking site boasting over 10.4 million unique users in January 2008. That’s insane! The dwell time on YouTube has huge potential and most of the content is created by the same people viewing it. Video is set to be the social media “star” of 2008 so why not embrace the trend by creating branded video content, offering the youth audience another opportunity to engage with your brand.

YouTube is everyone’s first port of call when they want to search for online video.
While it might not be the best quality service for video producers, it is by a long way the most popular. If you are a blogger, marketer, film maker or any other kind of online publisher you stand to gain a lot by getting some exposure on YouTube.

So how do you get your content noticed, when there are 6.7 million videos for your audience to choose from? Certainly, there is no replacement for making or aggregating great content, but there are several ways that you can make your presence felt, and drive traffic back to your own website:

* Create your own branded channel
* Tag your clips correctly to enable users to find them
* Link back to your own site
* Create compelling content to kick start a viral campaign
* Link to your content channel/video from your own website

Here’s are a couple of fantastic examples of how marketing can be effective using social media sites. Whilst this is a large brand, principles can be taken and applied to smaller brands.

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The biggest thing to remember, no matter what you are promoting, is that your video needs to have direct and obvious value to the viewer.

If you are selling a product then a simple how-to or demonstration video is worth more than a traditional advert.

The nature of youtube is that users shy away from gloss and are looking for something ‘real’. If you spend less time ( and money ) on making a professional looking video and more on fun engaging content you will see much better responses.

Video content is king in 2008