YouTube is officially the second largest search engine in the world after Google itself. It processes more than three billion searches a month and is bigger than Bing, Yahoo!, Ask and AOL combined!
Event marketers who ignore YouTube are missing the opportunity to expand their reach to the platform’s one billion plus users.
Creating great video content can grow your event brand beyond your existing local audience by generating global interest. If you hope to launch internationally or simply want to make sure you sell out every time, a thriving YouTube channel can help you nail your market.
Check out how these 10 event brands use YouTube to spread their net further and engage with their audience digitally…
Related: The complete guide to video marketing for events
The World Science Festival is an annual week-long festival in New York and, as of 2016, Brisbane. Since its inception in 2008, it has drawn 1.5 million attendees, but millions more have witnessed the festival’s content online.
The content covers a range of scientific topics such as mathematics, physics and technology, with all videos presented with compelling titles and intriguing thumbnail graphics.
Quality digital content was always a priority for the festival, which was co-founded by Tracy Day, an Emmy Award-winning journalist who has produced live and documentary programming for US television.
While rooted in science, the events at the World Science Festival also conform to the production standards of professional TV and live theatrical events.
South by South West (SXSW) is an annual collection of music, film and interactive media events that take place in Austin, Texas and attract thousands of attendees.
SXSW has cultivated a huge online following through its YouTube channel and has even partnered with the platform to enhance its live content.
At the 2016 festival, YouTube hosted its own 3-day event to support and celebrate musicians. It showcased 18 live performances with a wide range of talented musicians, both newly discovered and well established. It also laid on an Artists Hub, where SXSW artists could avail of a masseuse, barber station, hair and makeup bar and gear storage service.
Endurance race Tough Mudder was established in the States in 2010 and has quickly grown into a worldwide phenomenon.
More than two million people have now taken part in a Tough Mudder event and it owes much of its success to social media. The first event was advertised exclusively on Facebook and since then it has used imagery of participants overcoming its gruelling obstacles to propagate social promotion.
Its YouTube channel features the inspiring stories of participants, previews of new obstacles and episodes of Coachified, Tough Mudder’s “team-building, comfort zone-crushing” original web series.
Campus Party is a series of tech events for self-confessed geeks, taking place in eight different countries.
On their channel they publish everything from slickly produced promo videos to basic, fixed camera recordings of event sessions and interviews. The key is the quantity, with as many as 450 videos uploaded for any one edition of the event.
This exposure has no doubt helped Campus Party grow from a single event in Malaga, Spain in 2007 with 50 participants, to a global series of events attracting up to 10,000 people a time.
Golf series the PGA European Tour has been uploading videos to YouTube for more than 10 years. This early adoption paid off for The Tour’s organisers, whose videos have clocked up more than 52 million views.
On its channel, fans can relive the greatest shots ever played on The Tour, as well as behind the scenes footage, Q&A’s with players and technical instruction.
The European Tour’s most popular video to date is Rory McIlroy competing against a golfing robot on a course of washing machines, which has amassed an incredible 6.5 million views.
Download Festival is a five-day rock music event in Donnington Park, Leicestershire. The festival launched in 2003 as a new incarnation of the 80’s rock festival Monsters of Rock, and aimed to harness the power of the internet to connect with fans (hence the name).
In the beginning, the festival tickets had a code on them, which allowed festival-goers to download tracks from bands that had played. Although this idea was later dropped, the festival organisers have nurtured an online community through the Download Festival Forums and its other online channels such as YouTube.
Its channel is packed with performances, band interviews, webcam time-lapse footage, live streams and even playlists compiling their favourite third party music videos.
With its red carpet premiers and swanky Croisette location, the Cannes Film Festival is out of reach for most movie fans – but not with YouTube!
The festival uses the platform to provide live coverage of all the key moments such as photocalls, press conferences, red carpets events and interviews.
CES, which takes place annually in Las Vegas, is the world’s largest tradeshow for consumer technology.
It uses YouTube to generate excitement ahead of each show date by releasing slickly produced videos announcing keynote speakers, show feature and providing a platform for tech start ups to pitch their products.
CES also sends its own reporters out onto the show floor to produce exclusive reports on hot topics such as wearables, home automation and immersive gaming.
Startup Grind is a global community of entrepreneurs hosting monthly events in more than 170 cities and 60 countries.
As well as offering networking opportunities, the events focus on telling the stories of successful startup founders, innovators, educators and investors. In ‘fireside chat interviews’ they share lessons learned on the road to building great companies, which naturally makes for great online content too.
They also share tonnes of content from their annual Global and Europe conferences, like the session below with Eventbrite’s very own Julia Hartz (Co-Founder and CEO).
PHP UK Conference is an annual non-profit event run by volunteers for the benefit of London’s web developer community.
However, they ensure that programmers across the country (and the world) can also tune in by hosting recordings of all the event’s sessions on a dedicated YouTube channel.
While the two-day event, held at The Brewery, attracts around 700 attendees, the education content on offer has been enjoyed by many more, with 315,274 views to date.
Related: How to curate your event’s content like a pro
Conclusion
As you’ll see from these events’ YouTube channels, there’s a huge variety in the quality of production standards. Crucially, not everything you put out has to be Oscar-worthy.
Just setting up a camera on a tripod and recording sessions to share can increase your online exposure and grow your audience. You’re investing in your event content, so be sure to squeeze as much value from it as possible!
