Even though you only perceive YouTube as a place to watch funny videos of laughing babies and make-up tutorials, YouTube has firmly established itself as a social media website.

Similarities between YouTube and other Social Media Platforms

Most Social Media Platforms have a few things in common. YouTube shares many elements of a Social Media Platform while also being one of the largest search engines on the web, second only to Google itself.

Like other social media platforms, visitors and logged-in users subscribe to channels that interest them, leave a thumbs up or a thumbs down on the videos they have watched, and even leave comments and share those videos. Content recommendations are based on user behavior and the social graph/connections, akin to how other social networks recommend friends and their content. YouTube even has a “newsfeed” or a “wall”, which displays videos from the channels a user has subscribed to, as well as recommendations on similar content. Visitors can build profiles like on other social media networks, upload/change their display picture, and follow, or subscribe in YouTube-speak, their friends. Not to mention, Ninety-five percent of all views come from user-generated content, and not the official videos. This means that a majority of the time you are watching a clip from a movie or a TV show, it was probably uploaded by a fan and not the official channel. However, YouTube’s proprietary tracking algorithm still makes sure that the copyright owner gets paid. Similarly, 95% of all views of brand-related content come from consumer uploads, not official brand videos.

YouTube has an army of content creators and some of them are even creating active, engaged communities of their own, bringing disparate people from all over the world under one umbrella. One of my favorite YouTubers, has built a community of people who play video games together, build game mods specifically for the type of gameplay their community enjoys playing, fund their own community-run servers, and have even started building new, original video games with development teams from within the community.

When comparing YouTube to other social media platforms, YouTube influences purchase behavior and decisions among more than 53% of all consumers, while 55 percent of respondents engaged with brands on Facebook, only 21 percent do so on Twitter, and 10 percent have done so on Pinterest.

Why YouTube is one of the best Social Media Platforms?

It Improves your Search Engine Optimization

Seeing the proliferation of video content in the past couple of years, it comes as no surprise that video has become the most preferred content format. The best thing about video content is that it is highly shareable on other social media platforms and accounts for almost 74% of all online traffic. Since Search engines have also started displaying video suggestions in search engine results, when you share a video on YouTube with SEO-optimized descriptions, titles, and tags, it can help you improve your search engine rankings. This means that YouTube SEO can really give you more bang for your marketing bucks. People frequently visit YouTube when they want to learn something new or when they wish to be entertained. In addition to cute animal and baby videos circulating the web and super Bowl YouTube videos being passed around on our social media platforms weeks before the actual event, we also see a lot of space for brand advertising. Boasting over a billion users, YouTube is an ideal platform to boost brand awareness, make your brand visible to a wider audience, and build an army of loyal customers. In all this, YouTube SEO plays a pivotal role in marketing; for instance, brands can leverage paid YouTube advertising to drive traffic towards YouTube channels.

It helps you Reach A Wider Audience Base

People respond well to visual cues, and video is a perfect method for capturing the emotion and physical attributes of what you’re promoting.  If you are looking to grab your customers’ attention and keep them hooked, YouTube is hands-down the most robust social media platform. In addition to offering affordability, measurability, customization, and targeting, YouTube advertising also enhances your outreach. YouTube’s 2 billion users visit the platform every month, not to mention another couple billion unregistered users who contribute towards the daily view of five billion videos. Look at each video as a marketing real estate, which can expose your business message and ad to the interested audience. With YouTube’s intelligent marketing tools, you can target videos based on the appropriate categories, topics, and keywords, and increase the chance of the right audience coming across your ad. Also, placement targeting helps you identify YouTube pages you want your ads to appear on. All these advanced features make sure you reach out to the right audience and help you get the word out about your business the right way. YouTube also offers enhanced customization features, which let businesses personalize their ads based on their target audience.

It Builds Community

YouTube plays a pivotal role in building up a community on the social media platform. YouTube creators, are not just a part of a video streaming platform, but are much, much more in the greater scheme of things. YouTube takes care of its creators, allows them to hang out with other creators, and fosters a sense of community. YouTube is nothing without its millions of creators who work hand in hand as a team to do great things and share the workload of the platform. Billions of users watch videos of different creators, follow them religiously, learn different things from them, heed their advice, buy their products, etc.

Mobilizing Underrepresented Talent

Facebook may be the ultimate face of “social media”, but it can never have the creative firepower of YouTube. Firstly, because it doesn’t pay its influencers for the content they create, and secondly, it does not yet have a standalone product for users to create on. You can look at Facebook as an amalgamation of mountains over mountains of content-driven from third parties across the web. On the other hand, YouTube is a blessing in disguise for those creative minds and aspiring filmmakers who never had the chance to make it big. Not everybody is born with a silver spoon in their mouths and not everyone has connections. For those people, platforms like YouTube give them a chance to show their work to the world.

Similarly, Instagram is full of aspiring photographers who have amazing photography skills but cannot splurge an arm and a leg in equipment. Medium is home to writers who could have published their own books but got into the blogosphere too late to be competitive. This shows how a lot of social media platforms have been designed to let underrepresented talent shine, and give them their well-earned moment in the limelight. Platforms like YouTube make sure to put their users first beyond anything else; what follows next is creativity.

In foresight, it is a really wise move to mobilize this talent: creative minds keep users hooked on platforms. Without these self-proclaimed content creators, social media channels would lack the appeal for brands to invest their dollars into, and no user would want to while away hours on those platforms. Perhaps the biggest asset of YouTube is its creativity and artists, and the platform does make sure to reach out and invest in them.

Gamification and Recognition

Last but not the least, another thing we love about YouTube is that it gives its creators gamification and recognition for their efforts. Creators get rewards for completing milestones. For instance, you get a silver play button when you reach 100,000 subscribers, a gold button for hitting a whopping 1 million, and a diamond button for gaining 10 million subscribers. For users and creators, continually using a platform should be fun, but rewarding their hard work and effort boosts usage and brand loyalty. Reddit does a spectacular job at this via their karma reward system.