Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

YouTube has just passed Facebook and is bigger - Now the largest social media site in the U.S. Yes, that's right - the largest social media site.

I was among the first to show that YouTube was the third largest search engine in a presentation entitled, “Getting Found in All the Right Places,” at a SEMNE event on Nov. 7, 2007. And I may have been the first to observe that YouTube was about to pass Yahoo! in expanded searches in a story that was published in Search Engine Watch on July 20, 2008. So, I suspect that the second part of the line, “YouTube has grown to become … the second most-used platform for searching,” is old news.

If anyone wants an update, here’s the U.S. data from comScore qSearch for May 2014: Google had 12.5 billion explicit core searches, YouTube had 4.0 billion search queries, Microsoft had 3.5 billion searches, and Yahoo! had 1.8 billion....

Ready to get started on YouTube? Or wish your YouTube Channel were performing better? I’m here to help!

YouTube is effectively the second largest search engine in the world (behind only Google). With video becoming more and more important (we even launched Buffer for video last week!), now is the perfect time to start optimizing your YouTube Channel and begin reaping the benefits of a strong video strategy, including connecting with new potential customers, getting a better search presence and building your brand.

I’ve had a lot of fun exploring YouTube optimization and wanted to share what I’ve found. Here is everything that I have learned and would do to optimize a channel....