YouTube is the largest video sharing website on the Internet and the second largest search engine, next to Google. YouTube is also a valuable internet marketing website for brands looking to increase their brand awareness, website traffic and overall sales through viral video and social media marketing.

YouTube enables users to upload and share videos, create channels for their videos and view statistics surrounding their videos.

Benefits of YouTube:

Reach – YouTube has over 40 percent of the online video market serving nearly 7 billion videos this past April, according to comScore. It is also an international website, so you can expose your product to millions across the world.

Free – YouTube provides video hosting, embed codes and in-depth analytics for $0, making it a cost-effective resource in any company’s internet marketing campaign.

Search Engine Optimization – Properly tagged and titled YouTube videos receive high placement on search engines, especially on Google, as YouTube is owned by Google.

Search –

A compilation of tips and notes for a better Twitter experience:

• Tweets are limited to 140 characters.
• When it comes to following/followers choose quality over quantity. It’s better to have 100 followers who care for your tweets than have 10,000 followers who ignore them.
• Don’t just follow people just because they will follow you back. Keep your feed free from useless chatter. If you’re not interested in what they have to say, don’t follow them. Only follow people you are interested in and would like to learn more about, such as business leads, industry experts or entertainment tweeters.
• You are not obligated to follow anyone who is following you, and vice versa.
• Twitter is a social media tool, and the social part means engagement and interaction. Don’t make all your tweets about you, you and you.
• Keep the useless chatter to an absolute minimum, because more often than not, no one cares for tweets like “Eating a bowl of cereal” or “I can’t find my pen cap.”
• Your number of followers will grow as you post more useful, interesting tweets frequently.
• There is a sort of subculture

I realized that I failed to include Twitter terminologies (twerminologies) to the last post, Twitter for Brand – Part II: Getting Started (hence the fail whale), so, here’s an entire post dedicated to it (Twitter terms, not the fail whale – but maybe later):

@Reply – A direct way to comment or reply to another user. By placing @ before their username, that user will be notified that you have mentioned them in your tweet.
@YourUserName – A list of tweets that has mentioned you.
Direct Message/DM – A private message sent from one Twitter user to another. You can only send a direct message to a user who is following you.
Favorites – A list of tweets that you have favorited.
Feed – The stream of tweets from people you are following on your Homepage.
Followers – Users that have subscribed to have your tweets show on their feed; these people are following you.
Following – Users that you have subscribed to have their tweets show on your feed; you are following these people.
Follow Friday – A weekly keyword occurrence when

I had the pleasure of attending OMMA Video on Friday and met some great people including Easy To Assemble star and creator Illeana Douglas, TubeMogul CEO and cofounder Brett Wilson, Jay Baage with Digital Media Wire and Mediapost’s Liam Fleming. Following the first wave of panelists, I was asked for online video predictions in 2010.

Question: So, 2009 is coming to end and I know one of the Keynote speakers at the OMMA conference (Ross Levinsohn) said that 2010 is going to be the year of social media and online video. What’s your opinion of that statement?

David Murdico: Well, I think that 2010 is going to see a lot more online video. I think we’ve got a lot of consumer generated video that’s out there like crazy and I think that the tightrope we walk as marketers, especially in the online video and social media marketing arena, is you want to create engaging content and you want people to watch it and to pass it along. But, if the audience sniffs any hint of being branded or having anything to do with a company or a product, they tend to not want to share it as readily.

Now that your palette is wet from the benefits of Twitter, this is how to get started with using Twitter for your brand as a social media marketing tool:

Setup
Sign up for a free account at Twitter.com. Choose a username that is unique and accurately represents your company. If you can use your company’s actual name, that is best since it will be easy for people to find and recognize you. Try to make your username short, so when people refer to you in a tweet, you don’t use up too many characters. When using Twitter for social media marketing, you want any sharing or mentioning of your brand to be as easy as possible. Fill in your profile completely with a bio of your brand or company, a link to your website or blog, and a picture. A profile without a picture is often seen as a spammer and ignored. The bio and link are also important because then people can easily see what your brand is and then follow the link to your website to learn more.

When you’re set up, start tweeting. Highlight your company’s interests by tweeting about them or linking to blog posts and videos you’d like to share. After a few solid tweets search for your friends and other companies in your industry by clicking the “Find People” link at the top. Search for topics related to your brand and follow those interesting people. The reason to make a few solid tweets before following people is because when you follow someone Twitter notifies that user and very often that user will check out your profile and tweets to determine if you’re worth following back. Do not be discouraged if people you follow don’t follow you back. You should be following them because you’re interested in what they have to say and not so you can bump your followers count. Don’t just take in other users’ tweets. Engage them and start a conversation. This is social media, after all!

Community
The community on Twitter ranges from

Twitter is a micro-blogging service used to communicate with other users through the exchange of quick, frequent messages referred to as “tweets.” These tweets are posted to your profile page, posted to your followers’ feeds, and are searchable on Twitter search. Another way to look at Twitter is it’s much like a giant online bulletin board, and tweets are the posts.

Twitter is an excellent tool for social media marketing and expanding awareness of your brand. Here are some specific ways it can be beneficial for your brand:

Quick Updates – If you have an update to announce to people that doesn’t warrant an entire blog post then Twitter is the perfect place for it.

Brand Building – Twitter serves as another platform to promote your product/service/company.

Personal Branding – You can position yourself as an expert and be a direct resource for your industry’s information.

Engagement – Readers can leave comments on blog posts and you can respond, which builds a relationship between blogger and readers.

Traffic Generator –

Here are some tips to best utilize Facebook for your brand:

• By default, the wall is completely public, so whatever you write there, others will be able to see it. However, this can be adjusted through settings.
• You can leave attachments on people’s walls, including photos, videos, and all sorts of rich media items that have been integrated with Facebook applications.
• There are two easy ways to share links on Facebook. One is to copy and paste a link into your sharing page. The other is to add the “share on Facebook” bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks bar. If you intend on sharing things on a regular basis, we’d recommend adding the bookmarklet, as it gives you a one-click option to share something and continue browsing. Either way, once you put in a URL, it will scrape the page to grab any related pictures and a brief description. You can also go in and add your own text, which will show up right underneath it. Once you’re done tweaking it to your liking, you have the option to post it to your profile, or send it to others on or off Facebook.
• Don’t put

Facebook is a social networking service that lets you connect and stay in touch with friends, family, colleagues, coworkers, and others who share similar interests or have common backgrounds. You can provide constant updates to your network of friends, leave them comments and vice versa, share content (videos, pictures, music and links) and create or join groups/fan pages among other things. What makes Facebook different from other social networks is its extensive privacy controls, development platform, and its large and quickly growing user base. Facebook has been called the “thinking person’s” social network.

Benefits of Facebook for a brand include:

Reach – Facebook has over 300 million users, making it the largest social network in the world.

Reconnecting – Facebook isn’t just a place to reacquaint with old high school friends, but also for previous clients and leads. Previous clients may be ready to do business again and leads may be ready to do business this time around, so you want to be prepared when the situation arises.

Building Relationships – Simply connecting with clients and leads is not enough, engagement is required. Facebook allows for a more personal approach to keep in contact. Developing New Relationships: Because your friends’ activity is public along with whoever comments on it, that gives you a foot-in with your friends’ friends.

Example:

Now that you’ve Stumble(d)Upon the benefits of social bookmarking and discovered how Delicious it is for your brand I bet you’re itching to Digg in and get in the Mixx. There are over a hundred social bookmarking sites (SBS), so start with a few that seem interesting to you and get a feel for it. Certain SBS are niche based such as Sphinn which only pertains to the world of marketing, SugarBiz for small to medium sized businesses and YCombinator for hackers and businesses among others.

Majority of SBS are free, so it doesn’t hurt to sign up for multiple accounts. Be sure to set up and flesh out all of your profile pages before you start submitting links. You want to be prepared when someone comes across your submission and looks into what affiliation you may have with the submission. When your profile is set start submitting links of your website, videos and best blog posts. Add a description to every submission when applicable. Always tag your submissions properly. Every SBS is different and offers its own unique approach, so explore each site to really understand how social bookmarking work and how useful it is to discover content.

Here are a few additional suggestions, tips and notes to help make your social bookmarking experience more successful:

• Register with as many SBS as you can handle, because the more places you submit your links the more exposure you’ll get.
• Here’s a list of 125 Social Bookmarking Sites.
• If your company gets written about you should promote the article by submitting it through SBS along with all your other social media outlets.
• Tags are

There is an overwhelming amount of social bookmarking sites, and for good reasons. Before I get into the benefits I should explain what social bookmarking is. Social bookmarking is a form of storage, organization, management and sharing of links (websites, articles, pictures, blog posts and videos) to the Internet by a user. The links are stored to a website, organized and managed through tags and comments/notes, and shared by allowing others to see the links you’ve saved/bookmarked. This allows you to view your links from any computer with an Internet connection, oppose to the old way of bookmarking links to a web browser on one particular computer. Some social bookmarking sites (SBS) suggest relevant links of interest based on the tags you provide to your links.

Here are the benefits of using social booking sites.

Targeted Search – The search engines of SBS are uniquely high-quality because they focus on tags made by the bookmarkers instead of systematic algorithms attempted by software like traditional search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. A search done on SBS offer a more narrow and relevant scope.

Search Ranking – Because of the popularity of SBS they rank very well in traditional search engines. Therefore, search results on SBS often index and show up high on traditional search engines.

Traffic Generator –