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Video Marketing: You Should Have Planned It First

If you are starting to consider video marketing, you may have read things like, “up to 50% of marketers will increase their video marketing budget in the coming year” and that “video marketing will become the top marketing strategy to invest in”.

Sounds promising! And it is backed up with facts like:

  • YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine in the world
  • YouTube is the 3rd most visited site in the world
  • More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month
  • Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
  • Mobile makes up almost 40% of YouTube’s global watch time
  • Websites with video can achieve up to a 30% higher conversion rate
  • People who watch video online can be up to 80% more likely to purchase
  • YouTube videos can be easier to rank in Google than a web page

It’s easy to get started with YouTube; you simply create an account with them and brand you channel and start uploading video.

However, what you may not know is that with the introduction of Google+ profiles, Google made a number of changes towards the end of 2013 that meant your YouTube account must be linked to a Google+ profile or page.

So what does this mean?

Firstly, YouTube now allows you now to run up to 50 channels from a single YouTube account and for every additional channel you create they create a linked Google+ page for it. From a marketers perspective this makes managing multiple channels and Google+ pages simpler as everything is managed from one primary account.

However, when setting up your YouTube channel or channel’s there are a few really frustrating things you need to take into consideration.

You cannot have a YouTube channel without a linked Google+ account, this means your channel name is now pulled and edited from your Google+ profile or page. Also when you comment on another video you will comment as the Google+ page or profile you are logged in as.

Once you allocate a custom URL, for example – http://www.youtube.com/MarketingMavens then that URL is permanent and cannot be edited or transferred. You can delete it but if it is your primary Google account linked to your primary Google+ profile, you have to delete both of them in order to create a new channel with a different URL.

You can delete any addition YouTube channels without deleting your primary YouTube channel, providing you delete the linked Google+ page during the process.

The big take away from this is how to protect your YouTube custom URL’s for your brand. Take the time to plan your profiles before you create them, how many channels will you need and which channel do you want to link to the main profile vs linking to a Google+ page.

From experience we would recommend creating a master company Google account and running your Company Google+ profile, page and YouTube channel from it. If you are going to have more than one channel, map out channels with what custom URL’s need to link to which Google+ pages or profile before you start creating them.

It’s very easy to login to YouTube using your Google+ profile and allocate http://www.youtube.com/MyCompany (now permanent) to your profile instead or your company page, leaving you frustrated and considering whether to add Vids, Official, HQ, Ltd or some other variation on the end to make it unique again.

We know we did it!

Another tip to consider is not to let an employee or agency set up your YouTube channels on their own Google accounts. Remember YouTube accounts are not transferable and cannot be merged once setup.

If you don’t own the account and your relationship with that employee or agency were to end, being back at square one may be the least of your worries. To help you, download our guide to setting up social media.