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YouTube YouTube Visitors: 1 Billion Served Monthly Sidebars: YouTube by the Numbers YouTube Visitors Pharma Companies Using YouTube The Impact of YouTube’s Redesign Best Practices for Using YouTube Effectively Trending Now: YouTube is the perfect channel for patient and physician education. Changes in its design and increasing numbers of viewers should mandate a sharp focus on the medium by pharma. YouTube Reaches 1 Billion Viewers In April, Google announced that YouTube hit the 1 billion viewers per month milestone. According to Google, the increase comes from the rise of users accessing YouTube from their smartphones. The company reports on its blog that the amount of time the new generation — called Gen C for connected — spends watching YouTube on their smartphones is up 74% from 2011. Nielsen has named this group Generation C because it is not defined by an age group, but by the connected behavior of its members. Gen Cers watch YouTube on their smartphones as a complementary activity to their lives. For example, 41% of Gen Cers tune into YouTube on their smartphones while waiting for something/someone; 18% tune in while commuting from work or school; and 15% tune in while commercials are running on TV, Nielsen reports. On smartphones, most of Gen Cers engage with YouTube as a destination by actively searching for videos on YouTube (47%). Viewers are also discovering videos socially; 9% of respondents say they watch videos on their smartphones because they were shared by friends in an email, while 18% watched a video because it was shared on a social network. The Impact of YouTube’s Redesign In March, YouTube announced significant changes that will impact channels managed by pharmaceutical companies come June. YouTube is moving from being a video-only platform to establishing a dynamic, highly visual environment that invites engagement. Similar to Facebook’s recent redesign announcement, the new YouTube layout employs responsive design elements that recognize the importance of maintaining a consistent experience across devices. Most of the new features are mandatory. If channels don’t proactively migrate to the new layout, YouTube will automatically convert them. Pharma channels have until June 19, 2013, to comply. Source: Intouch Solutions Brad Einarsen Director of Digital Insight Klick Health Twitter: @bradeinarsen YouTube’s recent redesigns are more than just a change to some of the window dressing, they speak to the core of what users expect on the social platform. The user’s experience has changed, and will continue to change, toward a more social experience and away from the simple search-and-view model. In this new experience the subscribed channels become very important to the user’s experience because all updates are shown on each login in the user’s newsfeed. To get the most out of a YouTube channel companies need to post often so that they show in their subscribers’ news feeds. They can augment this by also liking other channels and generally engaging on the platform like a user rather than a channel. To see an example of these new engagement patterns in action, turn to the J&J channel at (youtube.com/user/jnjhealth. Ross Fetterolf Senior VP, Digital Strategy + Analytics Palio Ignite Twitter: @DigitalBulldog YouTube’s new “One Channel" offering brings a responsive-design approach to all channels from Annoying Orange to Pfizer Health, ensuring that the channel experience is optimized to the end user’s screen size. The impact will be twofold. First, pharma will receive continued, yet potentially unwelcomed, reinforcement that social media properties must be viewed as ever-evolving destinations with maintenance budgets and med-legal availability to match. And second, the importance of providing value to the audience, regardless whether it is branded or unbranded information, will be heightened. Pharmaceutical companies and their agency partners will need to approach YouTube differently now. They will need to prioritize their content that best meets users’ needs and understand that this requires adoption of a mobile-first mindset. Companies will need to lead with content that is designed for the small screen, where users’ needs — especially as it relates to making healthcare decisions — differ greatly from their reasons for visiting desktop destinations. Best Practices for Using YouTube Effectively Mark MacDonald Senior Analyst, Strategy MEplusYOU Pharmaceutical companies are going to be hard pressed to match the entertainment value of kittens playing piano or goats screaming like grown men. It doesn’t make sense for most pharmaceutical companies to even try and be entertaining or funny just because that’s what’s popular. Once companies come to accept this fact, they have already taken the first step toward success on YouTube. Fortunately for the industry, people really like searching for answers and watching videos that teach them how to live healthier lives. Part cultural infatuation with personal care management and part love affair with multimedia, there is a real opportunity to provide value using video content. Whether this involves properly educating users on what a T-cell is, showing viewers how to use an inhaler, promoting a recent corporate event, or providing value starts that educate viewers to better understand what the company stands for (purpose), and what knowledge and information is useful to people. By staying true to the company brand and infusing its purpose into the video content, companies can make the difference between having five views or 50,000 views, and this will also make them a trusted source that keeps people coming back for more. YouTube by the Numbers: » One out of every two people on the Internet visit YouTube. » Monthly viewership is the equivalent of about 10 Super Bowl audiences. Source: Google Viewing of branded videos grew 91% over the course of Q4 2012. Source: Ooyala Roughly 1.5 billion people will watch at least one online video by 2016. Source: Ooyala
