by Diana Lewis
Account Coordinator
With all the buzz about Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks, many people haven’t noticed the improvements and new face of YouTube. From your favorite sports highlights and dance competitions to make-up tutorials, science experiments and even movies, we all know there’s a lot of great stuff on YouTube. But, YouTube has updated and upgraded the user experience to make the site more social. Here are a few of my favorite new features:
ENHANCED CHANNELS
While channels have been around for a while, users can now customize their channels more than ever before to personalize the brand experience. The new channel behaves more like a micro-site for your brand than a search engine. You can link all of your websites and other social media accounts to your page and choose the format of your content. The result is clean and simple, and the process is quick and easy! Plus, there are hundreds of video tutorials on YouTube to walk you through the process if you get confused.
IMPROVED NEWS FEED
Subscribing to YouTube channels allows you to receive custom, up-to-date information from your favorite channels and playlists without having to regularly check their pages for updates. YouTube now offers several RSS feeds for categorized groups of videos (such as recently uploaded, top viewed, etc.) as well as customized feeds for users and tags. It’s even easier to keep track of the videos you care about and want to see, rather than searching for days to find them. For example, one of our clients, the Florida Redevelopment Association (FRA) has a channel and a #BetterCities playlist that people use as a resource for redevelopment inspiration, best practices and redevelopment plans. Once you subscribe to the feed you can chose to get notified when the playlist is updated.
INTEGRATED SHARING
Sharing is now made even easier through Facebook, Twitter and GooglePlus. It’s easy to post videos you’ve uploaded and found on YouTube with your friends and social networks. It’s also a great tool to share coverage of events and conferences.
NEW LOOK FOR BROWSING
The Browse page has a fresh look-and-feel to help you find great content on YouTube. Alongside the top lists like “Most Viewed Today,” you can discover and subscribe to more channels from the browse pages that will regularly update on your homepage feed. You can also discover content by browsing categories such as Entertainment, People & Blogs, Science & Technology and more. You’ll find it all on YouTube.com/browse.
YouTube gives you the ability to broadcast to an audience of millions in the most dynamic format available. 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute, resulting in nearly 8 years of content uploaded every day – that’s huge! From commercials, to music videos to government meetings – the brand has established itself as the ultimate video search engine and a powerful social media tool.
Are you giving YouTube the social love it deserves?