Using YouTube to promote your Employer Branding gets your brand message into the market! Creating video content today is much more accessible with the video capabilities in most smart phones and video-editing applications widely available. Original video does not have to be a massive expense and it can propel your brand awareness to the next level.

Why Use YouTube?

Much of your target group is spending more time online than watching television.
Generation C – the connected generation, in particular, thrives on online content – and video content is regularly shared. Each video creates an opportunity to create a viral event – think of the Man your Man Could Smell Like. That Old Spice commercial has been seen over 46 million times.
A short, impactful video can do more to create an emotional response to your EVP in a way that might get lost in more traditional marketing materials. Check out Adidas and this classic from Intel to see how both organizations take a small amount of time to tell you a lot about who they are, culturally. It can be a very efficient way to convey a large amount of information in a format your audience will find easy to digest.
But How do we use it?

You can use YouTube to help you build your brand audience in so many different ways.

Share Industry Expertise

Contribute to building the talent community that you hope to attract by sharing resources that will give your target audience a reason to keep coming back. You can use YouTube to share training presentations that might be valuable to your candidate or create a series of valuable tips or insights on your market.

Post an interview with one of your “in-house experts” and give your audience the chance to benefit from your expert’s experience – and showcase some of your brand ambassadors at the same time. YouTube comments are shared via Google+, so take the opportunity to create conversations with your candidate community around these video posts. Monitor the comments and take the time to respond as appropriate. Even better – take the time to post a video response to someone’s question or comment and create a video-conversation or vlog.

Showcase your company’s commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility

Create a video or a series of videos that show how your organization approaches sustainability or gives back. It’s a great opportunity to help your audience understand what your organization truly values and how your employees expect the organization to walk the talk. People can begin to feel like they are part of a movement or an initiative that is bigger than just their company. Philanthropy is particularly important to the millennial candidate population, who are very concerned with having a positive impact on the world.

Showcase Opportunity within your Organization

Create a Careers feature video that will tie together your entire employer brand platform and EVP. Showcase some of the amazing opportunities within your organization – provide an inside-look at a day in the life of different employees. Give your employees a chance to speak directly to the people they want to be their future colleagues. Including some unscripted video events will allow an authentic message about the EVP to come across.

Tips and Tricks

YouTube is the second most searched engine in the world, so by learning a bit more about how to maximize the return on your time, the potential reach is huge. There are many great blogs and instructional articles that offer advice to those of us who may be new to incorporating video content into our brand platform – but here are a few tips to get your started:

• Optimize your title. Help people find you by thinking about how people will search for your video. Make the title relevant to the content and to your message – but catchy enough to compel people to click on it
• Maximize your tags. The tags are the keywords that will help people find your video, so be sure to include all the relevant keywords. Check in, once your video has been posted for some time to see how people are finding it. You can update the tagging to remove or change out some of the less-used words
• Share your video – across all your platforms, within your employee base, to your friends. Be sure you “like” your video to increase the hits it will receive and then encourage sharing and cross-promoting to any of your social media feeds or websites
• Write a blog post and embed your video. Original content can really increase your SEO scores – Google owns YouTube – so it tends to rank sites with video content higher in their ranking

Part of the genius of a great branding effort is the way it can incorporate all the different channels available. There should be as many ways as possible for your potential future employees to interact with your Employer Brand. Using video to tell the stories of your EVP and to engage your community through YouTube is a great way to expand the reach of your employer brand.