The Social Power Of YouTube Search (Infographic)

The Social Power Of YouTube Search (Infographic):from Business 2 Community by Gavin Heaton

Creating a YouTube channel for your brand is a no-brainer. As the second largest search engine – and especially influential with younger audiences – YouTube can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of your digital strategy.
But just as we must optimise our blog posts and website pages to achieve decent ranking on Google’s search engine, we also also optimise our videos for effective search results on YouTube.
The interesting thing for me, however, is the focus and importance that is placed on the social dimension of the YouTube search algorithm.
Take a look at this great infographic from Martin Missfeldt – showing how it’s not just about the number of views or keyword relevance that are important. Other elements that impact your ranking include:

• Sharing – through social sites like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Google+, as well as the number of sites that embed and link to your videos
• Reactions – the number, type and style of interactions have a massive impact – including votes, responses, playlist additions, comments, reactions and so on
• Audience retention – how to your videos rate competitively, do they hold your viewers throughout the clip?

This social dimension means that – when combined with the overall strength of your YouTube channel (authority, trust, subscribers etc) – your success with video is largely reliant on your ability to create a vibrant community rather than casual video viewers. And that means really understanding your audience – not just uploading a ready-made TVC. And it makes me wonder whether this is Google carrying A/B testing on their search engine … because for ages I have thought that the future of search is social. This may be one of the early steps.