Study Illustrates The Importance Of YouTube For The Automotive Industry

Although Facebook is quickly climbing the ladder of video engagement success, there is no question that YouTube continues to be a major player in video promotion by digital marketers in the automotive industry.

In a new Octoly initiative, a comprehensive study was conducted to analyze automotive brands on YouTube. The study ranked 50 international car brands for views across YouTube channels worldwide, based on both earned and owned videos. The results clearly indicate just how crucial YouTube creators are in the perception of automotive brands in the online video world.

The study identified 1,049 YouTube channels that are directly managed by automotive brands. However, it’s important to note that more than 90 percent of the video views for the automotive industry are actually generated by earned media, such as fan-created video content. In other words, engaging a consumer base to the point where they are inspired to create their own videos about a brand is an essential component of online video promotion, and it’s important that marketers take note of this statistic.

Overall, the study found BMW is the most popular car brand on YouTube. BMW had 4.8 billion worldwide all-time views on YouTube across both brand and fan channels. Ford had the second most views overall with 3.6 billion, and Chevrolet was third with a total of 3.3 billion all-time views.

The research illustrates across-the-board, views of automotive videos created by fans outweighed those created by brands by 90.1 percent to 9.9 percent. Clearly, this remarkable statistic is a reminder to marketers about the importance of getting consumers involved in creating their own video content relating to their brand.

It’s clear that empowering influential YouTube users to tell their own video stories can be crucial in creating a wide-reaching video campaign on the platform. While media spend gets the conversation started, it is generally subsequently passed from the brands to influential YouTube users who are able to reach a much wider audience overall.

Another important aspect of YouTube campaigns is to recognize the various levels of engagement and types of content that can further the reach of your brand. YouTube’s “Hero, Hub, Hygiene best practices”, illustrated below, offers some great advice about how to categorize these ideas.

It’s clear that YouTube is much more like social media than it is like television. This study illustrates that, for automotive brands in particular, YouTube may be as important to monitor as other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. By engaging with influential content creators and users, brands can use YouTube to develop massive video campaigns and to ensure that they target their ad spend effectively.