You Tube Gets More daily Hits than Facebook. Lots more.

Approximately 6,000,000,000 hours of video are watched on You Tube each month by 1 billion unique visitor hits per hours.  

Facebook, which has 1.3 billion subscribers, gets 757 million average daily users.

But hardly anybody in the bowling industry is using YouTube. Why?

Oh, I see a few random photos of tournaments and birthday parties, but I rarely, if ever, see a video, that has been edited and presents a nice 2 minute story about your bowling center.

With all this snow, somebody must have a great Facebook story to tell; how you helped a customer start a car; how the staff had a snow ball fight or how customers felt about the weather or how nice n cozy the bowling center was and what a relief to have a place to take the kids since schools were closed so much.

Well? Well?  Do you have any of that good stuff that builds your brand?  Send it to me if you do and I’ll post it for others to see your good work

Now while I am far from a technophile when it comes to You Tube, I have picked up a few tips (from attending webinars) along the way and I wanted to share them with you.

1. Create a Branded YouTube Channel

This step is often overlooked by small businesses. Your YouTube channel is basically your house for the videos you create and upload, the videos you have selected as favorites, and those that you have organized into a playlist.

A customized channel gives you the opportunity to add and showcase your center’s branding with specific colors, information and links to your website and/or relevant social media pages. A channel also gives viewers an option to subscribe to your content with the click of a button. Just follow the guides and tutorials on You Tube. 

2. Make Sure Your Content Fills a Relevant Need

Try to provide your customers with information about your center that is RELEVANT to them. Whether it’s the weather, Kids Bowl Free or new open play programs, you have a plethora of content to share.  For example, you can send some Learn to Bowl lessons for new bowlers and then encourage them to come in and try it.  

If you host a band on Saturday nights, then post videos about the band’s performance and the crowd reaction.  Or post videos about a fund raiser you had.  And get great testimonials as well. That way your audience will see that you are a part of the fabric of the community. 

By doing this you create valuable information and interest in you and your center, thus generating loyalty and trust.

3. Develop Videos that are Quick, Simple, Engaging, and Professional

Decent video cameras are no longer expensive, so you can make a professional video without breaking the bank. Pay attention to lighting the area, sound quality and shakiness of the camera. Your best bet is to use a tripod. It is important to plan an outline and a script prior to making your video. 

Much like writing a story, you will want to include a beginning, middle and end. Make sure your video has a purpose. Keep it simple and short. It’s recommend 2-4 minutes for a video. Preferably closer to two minutes.

4. Optimize Your Video

YouTube claims that more than 24 hours of video are uploaded every minute, so the number of specific videos on the site is constantly changing. It is important you do everything you can to make your video easily found.

Your videos should be findable both within and outside of YouTube. Videos often appear on the first page of search engines, and are a proven method of leap-frogging your competition to the top of the search results page. The fact that Google owns YouTube can’t be overlooked.

To make your video more findable, you’ll want to focus on three key areas

-Title: Make sure your targeted keywords are in the first few words of your title. Another trick is to add a colon after your initial keywords and rephrase your title for maximum effect.

-Description: Two things to keep in mind here: 1) start your description with a full URL, and 2) don’t be stingy with your description. Be as descriptive and keyword-rich as possible. This will help you get found more easily by people searching YouTube for your type of content.

-Tags: Be sure to include any and all related keywords in the tags field. These aren’t the only variables in getting found, but they’re the easiest to manage and control.

So get out there and start using YouTube like a pro…and have some fun too!