YouTube and Public Focus

As the most famous video social media, YouTube carries thousands of videos to people in the world. People can upload, view, share and comment videos on YouTube. Every unique style video has potential to be popular on YouTube: people like it, so it gets a lot of views.

YouTube = Online Video?

When people would like to watch some videos, YouTube is their first choice. The statistics of YouTube show that "100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute ". That is mean the rate of new video uploading is 6,000 times faster than your watching ability - if you can watch YouTube 24 hours per day continuously.

We also use the "YouTube views" to define the popularity level of a video: The most popular YouTube video in history "Gangnam Style" by artist Psy (1,793,150,452 views on 10-15-2013), if you wiki it, you can see this description: "On December 21, 2012, "Gangnam Style" became the first YouTube video to reach a billion views. As of September 21, 2013, the music video has been viewed over 1.787 billion times on YouTube, and it is the site's most watched video after surpassing Justin Bieber's single "Baby"."

You see, although YouTube and Online Video are the different concepts, but we think that YouTube represents Online Video. 

And that is why when you are writing a new blog on this Blogger website, if you click "Insert a video", you can only use YouTube links directly but not the links from other video websites. Try it! :)

How Does YouTube Lead Public Focus?

The nature of YouTube is a video social media. The slogan YouTube is "Broadcast Yourself", every one can upload video to it, and share other's video. 

For a video on YouTube, there are several elements would contribute to leading public focus. To understand the elements, you can watch this video "Proof Your Senses Are Lying To You": 

This video illustrates three psychological effects in our lives. People who are interesting in this field would focus on this topic, and share this one. In the end of this video, you can see "Subscribe" graphic link, if you click it, you will jump into the index of its publisher "BuzzFeedVideo". When this play is over, you will see several recommended videos, these videos include the relevant content with this one.

Then, if you open the video page, you can see the following elements: 

Under the title of this video, we can see how many people have subscribed the publisher of it; We can evaluate this video by like or unlike button; We can also see how many people have viewed this video, and how many people like or unlike it. This group of elements shows the objective rating of this video, the huge number of viewer increases its appearance frequency on YouTube, and makes more people want to watch it.

The following elements are About, Share, Add to, Statistics and Report. In the Share area, we can share this video onto different social medias, embed it into html page, or email it to others. This group of elements allow us to work on this video by our own ways, it is a flexible way to expand the effect of this video in public.

If you look down this page, you will find the comments of this video. People are sharing their feeling in this area. View the comments of others would make us understand more about this video, and lead to more thinking around this topic. We can also write down our comments. This is the most flexible part of YouTube, because we can share our subjective opinions with others in here.

On the right side of this video, there are recommended videos. People can find the relevant topics in this area; In another word, if we are watching the other videos, this video would appear in this area too.

All of these elements contribute to lead public focus. The public focus would make more and more people pay attention on this video (or topic), and it would derive different performances in society. It is a great opportunity for PR industry and marketing.



How Can We Use This Opportunity on PR and Marketing?

First of all, we can analyze the participants of YouTube by their watching histories: Young people are more likely to watch pop MV; university students and scholars would watch more social, political, and tech videos; female would like to watch more emotional content than male... Base on these analysis, we can segment the participants into different target PR/marketing audience groups.
  


Once we know the segmentation, we can start to send information to target audiences:  the Ads on the video, E-mail Ads, relevant video recommendations and so on. 

Not only we can increase PR and marketing on YouTube participants, the participants themselves could also help to achieve our goals. When people are designing the video, they can start to implant advertising or branding elements into the video, it always works because these elements will be spread with the video sharing behaviors. If the video is sparkling but hard to be understood, or it has a rich philosophical topic, so more people would like to comment on this video, and more people would search the meaning of this video in these comments. Because the interactive of the participants, the relevant PR and Marketing elements will also be considered again and again.