So far we've covered Facebook and we've learned about the influence the company has on the social media landscape. We've also looked at it's largest product, facebook.com and Facebook app. But there are many social media platforms outside of Facebook. In this video, we cover YouTube. By the end of this video, you'll have a better understanding of how the platform works and how businesses use it for marketing. Let's dive in with this video. "So here we are in front of the elephants. Cool thing about these guys is that they have really long trunks, and that's cool. That's pretty much all there is to say..."" What you just saw was the very first video uploaded to YouTube. That was Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. Jawed founded YouTube in 2005 together with his colleagues, Steven Chen and Chad Hurley. The three friends wanted to provide an easy platform for people to upload and watch videos. YouTube quickly became one of the fastest growing sites on the World Wide Web, and by 2006 over 25 million videos were uploaded to the platform, and that same year Google bought YouTube. Now, over two billion people visit YouTube each month, and every day people watch over a billion hours of video on the platform. More than 70 percent of YouTube watch time comes from mobile devices, and you can navigate YouTube in a total of 80 different languages. YouTube has made it possible for any video creator to get an audience, and while that may seem natural to us now it was quite revolutionary at the time. While many of us may not think of YouTube as a social network in the traditional sense, it has the core ingredients of a social network. Users can post videos, share videos like or dislike videos, and they can comment. So the content is generated by users and users can connect and interact with the content. For many users, YouTube is a place to watch video, a form of entertainment even if they don't upload or actively participate in the sharing on the platform. That may be why some people think of it slightly differently from other social media sites. In the US, we see an even split between men and women on the network. But we do see skew to younger audiences. Eighty-one percent of 15 to 25-year-olds in the US use YouTube and 70 percent of the YouTube views are on mobile. Users spend a lot of time on the platform with average usage in the US around 40 minutes per day. Let's take a look at how people and businesses around the world use YouTube. First, let's take a quick tour of the basics. When you go to www.youtube.com or the YouTube app on your mobile device you can start watching right away. If you want to comment, share, or save videos, or follow other people's channels you need to log in with your Google ID. If you want to upload videos, you'll need to create a channel. You can create a channel under your name, or you can choose a brand or company name. Once you have a channel, you can choose to make it public so people can subscribe to it and it can come up in search. If someone subscribes to your channel, your channel will appear on their YouTube homepage. Creating and managing your channels happens in YouTube Studio. Here you can edit your videos, sort them into playlists or groups of videos that you think work together, read and answer comments, and get insights on the performance of your videos and growth of your audience. Creators on YouTube who run the gamut from people saving a few individual videos to professional creators like Dude Perfect, or more traditional media publishers like CNN. Since anyone with a phone or computer can be a creator on the platform, YouTube has given rise to a whole new group of celebrities, the YouTube stars phenomenon. YouTube stars are people who've built their fame through broadcasting themselves on YouTube. Stars like Rick Garman, David Dobrik, and Jenna Marbles have very large and loyal followings, mostly made up of young fans. Their authentic style and low-key production make them quite different from celebrities in the traditional media. But it seems that those exact features are what make them attractive to their audience. These YouTube creators monetize their channels by sharing and the revenue from ads on their channel, or from sponsorships and payments they receive from businesses who want them to plug their products. Outside of the main free user-generated video platform, YouTube also offers a live TV service in the US called YouTube TV where people can stream over 70 TV channels. This is not the only subscription product YouTube offers. There's also YouTube Music, a music streaming service, and YouTube Premium which gives users an advertising-free YouTube experience and the option to download videos. In the US, YouTube also offers YouTube Kids, which curated content deemed appropriate for kids under 12, and some parental controls. Clearly, YouTube offers a variety of ways for people to keep themselves entertained. Now, let's look at how businesses use YouTube. How do marketers use YouTube? First, by building a presence. Businesses and brands can participate in the same way people can create their scan. A business can create a channel with content to engage its audience. Many brands create content on the platform from helpful tips and how-tos to behind-the-scenes content of how products are made. Marketers think about contents that may engage their customers and use YouTube as a way to distribute that content and engage people deeper into what the brand has to offer. Let's look at this channel from L'Oréal for instance. It's full of helpful tutorials, videos about products and so on, and L'Oréal organized it's playlist in the channel around different product lines and events. Educational videos and tutorials are popular among YouTube users and many brands rely on them to engage their audience. Second, marketers use YouTube for advertising. YouTube offers many attractive advertising options. Given the high number of people on the platform, YouTube is an attractive medium for marketers to find their audience. Ad types on YouTube include skippable video ads that appear before the main video, or short six-second video ads that cannot be skipped and that are often used specifically for mobile devices, and ads among YouTube search results on the YouTube homepage and alongside related videos. One other way in which marketers engage on YouTube is through the use of influencers. YouTube stars have a loyal audience and they often cater to a younger demographic. That audience is attractive to marketers and they'll often partner with these YouTubers who have a lot of influence over their fans. They will strike deals where the YouTuber will plug, or review a product, or mention a brand. Marketers will carefully select the influencers they work with based on the demographics of their followers and the nature of their content, their personality, and their communication style. While working with influencers is certainly not limited to YouTube, the rise of the YouTube stars has made YouTube one of the most important ways to get a message out through influencers with a large fan base. YouTube has come a long way since the iconic video at the San Diego Zoo. It's a vibrant network of video creators, an entertainment platform, and a way for people to connect through video. With over two billion users globally, it's an attractive place for marketers and one that features in many social media marketing campaigns.
