Thanks for sharing the info. I haven’t seen that study, but I’ll try to find. Makes total sense. However, it makes you wonder why the companies that create these videos for their site don’t ALSO put them on a site like YouTube. Wouldn’t that make sense? They’ll show up higher in Google searches and could dominate all of the health related searches on YouTube and probably pull people into their main site that they wouldn’t have had before. Syndication…you’ve got to do it these days.

There is some new research out from Manhattan Research which speaks to this, which they presented at the DTC fall conference a few weeks ago. Interestingly, the research says that consumers are largely seeking health video content from places where they are getting health information rather than video aggregation sites. So high quality health and information sites will continue to be an important source for quality health video…this makes sense. If you trust a site for health information, you probably will also trust them for health video. Rather than try to sift through pages of videos from unknown, questionable “experts”, health consumers choose to go to the same places they trust for information already, and get their dose of health video there.

There are strategies for pharma marketers to embrace this trend, for instance by delivering their own content in the context of third party trusted content. This allows brand messaging to live within trusted environments where health consumers are already going online. This may be used as an alternative or complement to the “YouTube Channel” approach that we’ve also seen but without some of the challenges discussed in this article related to adverse events and traffic generation.

I’d classify YouTube optimization as an “emerging” tactic, but it should be something where you’re doing the basics right. Unlike optimizing an entire website, there are very few considerations for a YouTube video. The 8 tips in the post really don’t require much extra effort, but do require that you think about how you use YouTube just a bit.

“Personally, I still think its for people searching for ‘fun things’”

(before I get crucified) should read:

“searching in the majority for ‘fun things’”

- of course Youtube does have people looking for other stuff like MOA videos, patient kinship, etc but I feel this is more a minority than with other more ‘traditonal’ search engines on a volume basis.