Integrating Your Google+ Profile with Your YouTube Content
YouTube is the third most visited website on the internet behind Google and Facebook with an amazing 800 million unique visitors every month1. The huge volume of both traffic and video that is uploaded to YouTube makes it a natural advertising platform, but it has also been used by many businesses as a place to make their promotional videos available to their online customers. With millions of subscriptions on the site every day, YouTube has become another place online where businesses are connecting with consumers, and it forms an important part of the online presence of companies that use it.
In the past it was necessary to create a specific YouTube account and then connect it to your various social media accounts in order to fully share it with your intended audience. Since Google purchased YouTube in 2006, it has been gradually integrating the video site into its larger framework of online services, while at the same time, slowly phasing out their own video platform known as Google Videos2. Displaying YouTube content prominently in their search results has been one of Google’s strategies for leveraging as much advertising revenue from YouTube as possible, and since the launch of Google+ in mid 2011, they have been gradually integrating YouTube with that as well.
Since early in 2012, every Google+ account is also a YouTube account, and according to their guidelines, if you delete your Google+ account then you lose your YouTube account and all of your video at the same time3. In fact, it is no longer possible to create a new YouTube account without linking it to a Google+ account, and only a limited number of accounts that were created before 2009 (when Google stopped accepting video uploads on Google Videos) have been allowed to continue without a Google+ link4. If you have old YouTube videos that you want to link to your new Google+ account, it should be a simple matter of logging into your old YouTube account and clicking on the “link-upgrade” link there. If you are signed into your Google+ account then it will automatically link to your YouTube account, and from then on it will display your Google+ profile on the YouTube video page4.
As with most of Google’s other integrations, like the recent transformation of Google Places into Google+ Local pages, this is aimed at producing more relevant search results for users. The great advantage of coordinating YouTube content with your Google+ profile is that it ensures that all of the promotional video that you want your customers to see will turn up in your SERPs together. Because the Google+ profile links these videos to your corporate website, it seems logical that they would also have a positive influence on the overall page ranking for websites that are linked to popular or highly rated video accounts.
As Google takes account of more of the social data that it is accumulating, being optimized for Google’s integrations is going to become as important as using quality content. Videos that your friends have liked or shared will be given a higher ranking in your personalized search results. More users will use Google’s personalized search functions as they understand that it produces better, more tailored search results, meaning that it will be more important to link all of your promotional material to your Google+ profile in order to take full advantage of the likes and shares that your content attracts. Infintech Designs can help you to make sure that you have linked all of your important video promotions to your Google+ profile so that they continue to drive traffic to your business.
References:
1. http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics/
2. http://youtube-global.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/google-video-content-moving-to-youtube.html
3. http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-plus-discuss/zzr1oZ7-uw4/1TVK9ylueaAJ
4. http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173914
