Did you know that 5% of time online is spent on YouTube?

It’s true. Or, at least that’s what YouTube claims. That’s not a figure you can ignore as an Internet marketer or small business looking to grow your website traffic.

I know a fair amount or small business owners don’t consider YouTube a business tool because their interaction with the site has been limited to high school kids spoofing TV shows and double rainbows sightings. In reality, a large number of people use YouTube to learn things and to discover new artists and trends. These people can be extremely receptive to targeted advertising while in this state.

For example, if I am searching for movies with “how to make pizza dough,” I might be very interested in your Italian cooking classes. If I’m watching videos about how to take a company public, maybe I’m ripe for your auditing services.

You can chuckle, but there are actually a number videos on that last topic on YouTube!

There are a few ways to use YouTube for advertising your business—two of which, we will cover here.

Promoted Videos

Your company can create the how-to and educational videos that your target audience would find compelling. This allows your prospective customer to grow familiar with you, your point of view and your products in a high-fidelity way without requiring a lot of your time.

With Promoted videos, you can bid on keywords and categories, similar to the way Google Ad Words works. If you have compelling video content that will spread your message, use Promoted Videos to increase your video’s audience.

This will cause them to appear high in search results, and appear at the top of the page when a user is viewing a relevant category. You pay each time someone clicks on your video and watches it in a promoted position (you don’t pay anything when they share it or come back and watch it multiple times!).

Even if your company doesn’t have videos to send users to, you can still take advantage of YouTube advertising with in-video ads.

YouTube Video Targeting Tool and In Video Ads

As a marketer, you likely has some insight into who your target audience is and can make some assumptions about the types of videos they may be watching. Remember the example of the pizza dough video? Use the Video Targeting Tool to find videos that you think your audience will be watching. You can search for videos by keyword and country, or search for videos being watched by your audience.

Once you find the videos and channels that you want to market in, you can place graphic or text ads right in the videos. Below is an example of each:

You can place text or banner ads in Videos on YouTube

In Video Ads are a bit of a throw back to traditional TV advertising, but more targeted and more accessible to small businesses, given your ability to test with limited ad dollars.

Spend a little time thinking about what videos your target customers may already be watching and explore the available content on YouTube. Just don’t blame me when you realize three hours have gone by and you’re still watching videos at work. Of course, then you’ll understand why so much time is spent on YouTube.

Advertisers haven’t arrived in mass yet, so the advertising rates can be more attractive than straight pay-per-click advertising on Google. I encourage you to consider the medium when planning your small business marketing.

Below are some resources to help you get to know YouTube advertising.

• An advertiser’s guide to YouTube
• Bubble: the best of advertising on YouTube
• YouTube advertising overview

This ability to discover new places and spread the word about your favorite places makes Foursquare a natural marketing and promotion tool for food and entertainment venues that thrive on foot traffic.

Most small businesses I meet ask me some variation of the same question, “how do I use this to market my business?” Until now, the answer has really been only about advertising your “deals” and offering incentives to the “mayor” of your location. The person who checks in the most at a location eventually becomes the mayor, and a deal is an advertisement that is served to someone who checks in within a radius of the advertiser (think two-for-one or a 20% off).

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on the new tools Foursquare is rolling out for small business marketing. They provide real interaction with your customers.

The article does a great job of exampling how businesses can use the tools to get new customers and increase the loyalty of their most frequent visitors, so I won’t go down that road.

Instead, I’ll make an observation about what Foursquare has the ability to turn into. Each time we show a client the power of Google Analytics, and the stats it provides them about who is visiting their website, how they’re finding it, and what they’re doing during the visit, their eyes get really big with possibility. I’ve even heard them speculate what it would be like to have this kind of data on their in-store traffic patterns.

Well, if you see what the Foursquare tools look like, you’ll see what I am getting at. You can have rich and powerful data on your in-store traffic just like Google Analytics gives you about your website traffic. And, just like we optimize websites based on traffic data, you can begin optimizing your menus, hours, specials, sales, ticket prices and staffing levels in new ways.

Check out Foursquare and the new small business marketing tools. Have fun inventing new ways to promote and optimize your business.

It looks like you are already giving special offers to Facebook fans as well as giving fans a sneak peak of new designs. We recommend posting a link to the exact product or collection you are highlighting rather than sending a user to the home page.

Yes! The beauty of the web as a consumer is instant gratification and effortless transactions. When you include a link with a tweet, status update or an email, the assumption of the user is that the link will be the most clear and specific place to go in relation to accompanying text. You may not realize this assumption exists, but it does.

I could undoubtedly cite a number of studies that support the innefectiveness of home page links compared to deep and specific landing pages in advertising, but I think some examples will convey the basic principle much better.

A Bad Example of a Promotional Tweet or Update:
New store hours at all locations: [insert home page link here]

A Better Example of a Promotional Tweet or Update:
All [insert store name] locations open two hours later! [insert link to specific page announcing the change]

An Even Better Example of a Promotional Tweet or Update:
Work late? All [insert store name] locations open two hours later! 10% off during our extended hours this week only: [insert link to specific page announcing the change and terms of the offer]

Notice that we got more specific with each example, and more focused on the benefit of paying attention to the user. By the last tweet, we’ve given the user incentive to remember and act on this information right away.

Let’s check out one more example.

A Bad Example of a Promotional Tweet or Update:
Lasik Surgery from $800 per eye [link to home page of eye center]

A Better Example of a Promotional Tweet or Update:
Wearing glasses to the beach today? Learn how Lasik can change your life: [link to benefits or testimonials about Lasik]

An Even Better Example of a Promotional Tweet or Update
Wearing glasses to the beach today? Never again with our Summer Lasik Special, starting at $800 per eye [insert link to promotion page of the special]

I hope this article will sharpen your social media promotions. Remember the glut of information user’s are experiencing while using Twitter and Facebook, and don’t sabotage your efforts by making them think more than they have to.