YouTube is Social Media … So be Social on YouTube!

Despite the fact that YouTube is the second most heavily-used social network in the world (only Facebook has more unique users), social interaction on the site itself seems to be somewhat lacking. Videos are posted, “likes” and “dislikes” are tallied, comments are added — but fruitful, two-way conversations are absent under most videos.

Make no mistake – YouTube is a huge piece of the social media puzzle. According to this Mashable article on YouTube stats, 400 tweets are sent that contain a link to a YouTube video every minute. Over on Facebook, 150 years worth of YouTube content is watched every day. YouTube is a machine when it comes to providing shareable content and thus, is an outrageously necessary tool in any comprehensive social media strategy.

But what about social interaction taking place on YouTube itself? Plenty of videos have comments…

… and it’s great to see this kind of interaction, but rarely do I see real conversations pop up in this space. This is entirely observational, but it seems the only two-way dialogue taking place in the YouTube comment section are arguments that erupt over more controversial or politically-charged videos (and sometimes over completely irrelevant, non-related topics the commenters veer off toward). Why not treat this as a space for thoughtful conversations the same way you would a Facebook page or blog comment section?

With Twitter you have the “retweet” – on Facebook, you can tag friends in your status updates – but how do we recognize our friends and subscribers on YouTube? We were fortunate enough to have one of BWF’s videos “liked” and “favorited” by jwagnerresearch…

…to show our gratitude, I felt it was appropriate to thank them on their channel.

Admittedly, this is the first and only time I’ve done this. Moving forward, I’m going to make this more of a standard recognition practice.

What approach does your organization take for recognizing the YouTube users who interact with your channel? Do you send messages? Post video replies to videos on their channel? Please let me know in the comment section below. I’d love to hear some ideas and examples. YouTube is too big to simply use as a media storage space. It’s not your grandparents’ TV, it’s social media – so let’s use it that way!