Professional Video Hosting Vs. YouTube Hosting

Once your video has been made, it’s now time to share it with the world. It’s vital that the right people see your video. And that it drives the right action.

One of the main questions that I’m asked by my video production clients at this stage is, should I be use Youtube to host my videos? Or should I be using professional video hosting?

If this is something you’re wondering about, keep watching, as I give you the pros and cons, and the right strategy to maximise the success of your videos.

Topic Summary

• Considerations before choosing
• Pros and cons of both hosting platforms
• Conclusion – Which one to use?

Professional Hosting or YouTube

Really, you can and should do both. It’s not either-or. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Every day, millions of people are going there. They’re looking to be entertained, but, increasingly, they’re looking for answers to their challenges. By having your video on YouTube, you have the opportunity to engage with an audience, educate them about what you do, and drive them back to your website to find out more.

But one of the biggest mistakes that I see businesses making is sending web traffic to YouTube to watch their videos. Which means they’re being hit with all sorts of distractions and competitions for their attention. I’ll talk more about this in this video.

So it’s important to understand that if you’re using YouTube to promote your business, there are some things it doesn’t do as well as professional video hosting:

Image Quality

Good professional video hosting, like the service offered by a Dream Engine simply looks better. It’s less compressed than YouTube, so it’s more vibrant and clear. It also streams faster, which means your viewers won’t be left high and dry mid-sentence!

Branding

Now, I like YouTube, but not so much that I want to advertise them in my videos. I’d prefer my audience to focus on my brand. And I think you should too. Because the more you can command the attention of your audience, the more you get to control the message, and the action they take.

Analytics

These days YouTube give you some interesting information about your audience. Like demographics and location. But professional video hosting will give you far more of an insight into how engaged your audience is. It’s even possible to track, on an individual level, who is watching your videos, and how often.

Now, this type of information is invaluable to a sales team because it gives them the perfect trigger to follow up with a prospect. If you are in discussion with a prospect, and you knew that they’d just watched a video about an aspect of your business, wouldn’t that give you a powerful, timely opportunity to follow up?

Ranking on Google

Just because Google owns YouTube, people automatically assume that Youtube videos rank best in Google searches. This is actually not the case. Because a professional video hosting service ,like the one Dream Engine offers, has built in search engine optimisation tools like a video site map, it is far more effective at being ranked by Google

Call to Action

You can tailor a specific message at the end of your professionally hosted videos. People can click on them and go the page you want them to eg and opt-in or a contact page. Compare this to YouTube. Look what they show you at the end of the video. They want to take your traffic and drive it somewhere else. Like a cat video. Or worse. A video by your competitor

Email Capture

We can capture email addresses within our video hosting. You can give viewers the opportunity of entering their email address with the video itself. This means that you are far more likely to capture contact details of people who have wandered across to your site.

Conclusion

So, like I’ve mentioned, YouTube is fine, but there are a number of areas where it just doesn’t compare to professional video hosting. It’s difference between having a focused video marketing strategy, and putting your video out there and hoping for the best.

We send a monthly report to clients that use our video hosting service. This means that you know how well your videos are working, you can take the right follow up action, and you can better measure your return on investment.

So in summary: when considering YouTube versus professional video hosting, the answer is both.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading. Do you have any questions or comments? Please put them in the comments box below. And if you’d like to discuss your next video production, get in touch with me today.