Vidyard + YouTube =

A well-informed and successful video strategy includes YouTube. There is no way around it, YouTube is a power house in online video and search.

Just like you can’t write a blog without SEO and distribution, you can’t create a successful video campaign without YouTube.

This isn’t to say that a professional hosting platform isn’t a good idea – YouTube embeds are often related to rabbit holes. Successful viewings often display ads or related content, sucking your audience away from your site. This isn’t going to change, YouTube’s business model depends on your attention span and time spent at www.YouTube.com

It’s important to be creative with the strategy…

This is where Vidyard, YouTube’s crime-fighting sidekick comes to the table!

YouTube is synonomous with online video. You’d be hard pressed to find someone, (anyone!) within your demographic that hasn’t encountered YouTube at least once in the last week.

Google (for obvious reasons) works very tightly with YouTube, optimizing it’s search algorithms for YouTube content and displaying relevant results in search. Don’t believe us? Try Google’ing “How to replace a toilet”.

YouTube integration isn’t only good for search results – it also has a powerful recommendation algorithm built in. People share content via YouTube links, if your video is properly tagged and descripted, chances are it will inevitably find your target viewing demographic.

So how does Vidyard make this better?

Great question. The answer is simple, Vidyard can let you play content from YouTube that you don’t own, it can kill the outbound link from YouTube hosted content, it can organize your videos better and it can publish any content you upload into Vidyard to your YouTube channel along with tags and meta-data.

The video below is a 2 chapter player – both pieces of content are being streamed directly from YouTube in HD.

The one thing we’re very keen on at Vidyard is making your content load lightening fast. You’ll notice that when you click play, the video instantly started rolling. This is some engineering magickery we’re working on the backend – it should load even faster then a standard YouTube embed.

So how do you use it? As with all things Vidyard, it’s easy-peasy.

1) To grab content from YouTube, simply click the big yellow “Add Video” button and select “Add from YouTube”.

2) The next thing you’ll want to do is search for the Video(s) you’d like to add to the player. In the example above, I searched through the Salesforce YouTube channel. Once you click “Search YouTube”, you’ll be able to select as many videos as you like to add to your player. In this case, I’ve added two: “What is Cloud Computing” and a recent favourite: “Rossignol’s Social Enterprise”.

That’s it, business as usual. You’ve now pulled content from YouTube, into your Vidyard player.

So what about the other way around? What if you’ve uploaded your own content to Vidyard and would like to push your videos into your YouTube channel?

1) Make sure you’ve connected your Vidyard account to your YouTube channel. This can be accomplished via “Account –> Accounts”. As you can see below, the “Vidyard” channel is attached to this account.

2) Now that you’re plugged into YouTube, you can push any of your previously uploaded videos into your channel. To do this, find the video you’d like to push and enter the “Details” section.

3) Once there, click the “Advanced”, drop-down. You’ll notice some pretty cool options, including, Push to YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. Once the push has been initiated, you’re free to leave the page! Keep in mind, that the tags you add to your videos will be sent alongside of the content. Make sure you tag to optimize Search relevancy!