Vimeo vs YouTube or your own platform for hosting business videos

Video isn’t just a new, shiny way to make content – it is the ultimate, modern way to market to audiences. Audiences have begun to expect a wide range of video-based interaction with your brand, and those who have reacted to this development are riding a wave of increased interaction and ROI. According to Syndacast, 51% of marketing professionals worldwide list video as their content with the best ROI. HubSpot says 90% of customers say videos help them in making product decisions.

Making this content is essential for brands and businesses, but which hosting platform to use still stumps many.

First thoughts can easily go to the free and easy video platforms out there: YouTube or Vimeo. But are these the best options for your business? We take a look at when not to use YouTube or Vimeo, and lay out the third and more bespoke option.

YouTube and Vimeo are excellent for users who want a free, easy-to-use platform to put public-facing videos. Their simplicity is perfect for casual users, or for brands that are happy with the simplicity.

But video content’s huge rise in popularity means that audiences are expecting more. With that means an increased demand for personalization and customization. A huge benefit of hosting business videos on a professional platform is that you can customize the channel and videos to the audience. Branding, look and feel, customer journey – all of the things you value so highly in marketing can be added to your video content.

One thing that’s undeniable is that Vimeo and YouTube both have large communities. As of June 2018, 300 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds, and there are 70 million registered members on Vimeo. The likelihood that audiences can stumble across your content or find it through being suggested videos is increased when a platform has such a large audience. If you have public-facing videos that you want to get in front of a wide range of people and potential new customers, these two platforms can do the job nicely.

The important thing here though is to consider your audience. A quality audience through a specially designed platform will reach more of your targets than throwing videos into the shark tank of 1 billion users that YouTube now boasts. If you want to be pushing out business videos on a bespoke, reliable platform that is full of customizable and audience-specific content, then that’s a definite reason not to use YouTube or Vimeo.

Settings on YouTube allow you to make your videos visible to people with a certain email address, and Vimeo gives you the option to set up password-protected access. However, these are not a guarantee of either privacy or exclusivity.

There’s any number of reasons why you might want either of these two things for your video content:

Privacy. Sometimes your video content isn’t for public eyes. Email address assigned videos and passwords can give your videos some privacy, but technology isn’t infallible. Nor are people. Human error can create all sorts of problems for business, and this applies to videos that you do not wish to be shared. Inadvertent sharing or someone failing to take the correct steps to secure a video can be costly.

Exclusivity. Content that targets specific audiences is a great way to boost your video strategy. Perhaps the videos are even for a certain segment within your wider audience. With this level of specificity possible in a personally created video platform, you can gain an edge over platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo.

Analytic capabilities increase as you pay for YouTube and Vimeo’s services, but there’s more information to see and use when hosting business videos on your own platform. A business video platform can give you a more indepth look at your analytics and deliver a higher quality of reporting. With so many people viewing videos, analytics gives you a huge opportunity to access this audience. Analytics can give you an idea of your best performing content, geographical statistics and conversion ratios. With a professional video platform you can even see the complete customer journey on your website, from the pages that your users visit on your site, to the videos that they watch, what interactive layers they get to see and even tracking the clicks on product images or links.

With video being such a vital medium for your content, why let all possible valuable data and the lessons it can give you go to waste?

An innovative video platform hosting business videos, and created with your business in mind, is not only a way to ensure all of the above problems are solved, but to take your business’s video content to the next level.

A video platform can give you a better user experience, deeper analytics, a better chance to access your desired audience, the exclusivity and privacy you want.

So what should a video platform be?

• Easy to use. Any platform you use should be simple to adapt and update. Whilst working with Binck, VIXY ensured that the video menu system was simple and user friendly so that new videos and interactions with clients could be added.
• Protected. We’ve already seen when not to use YouTube or Vimeo for security reasons. This increased protection and security via a specially built platform was especially important for VIXY’s client Alliander and their corporate communications. They wanted employees to share videos to help their learning experience alongside formal internal training – none of which was for public distribution. We created a federated login with their corporate network which meant users only had to log on once, and video content access was granted based on country, IP address and time period.
• A beautiful experience. Whether it’s YouTube or Vimeo (even with their paid options) it’s harder to create a beautiful experience for your users. VIXY’s platform enabled Dalton.be, a project with film distribution company Fonk, to create a branded video channel full of free (FreeVOD), subscription (SVOD) and pay-per-view (TVOD) content.
• Analytics. The platform that VIXY facilitated for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra was backed up by in-depth analytics. Hosting business videos on a platform like this allowed the organisation to gain profound insights into geographical playback, best performing videos and other viewer behavior. This is vital for businesses and their video content. After all, information is power when it comes to marketing.