YouTube Team Does Not Understand Social Media

Yesterday the YouTube team published a blog post announcing their presence in two social networks where YouTube fans can connect to the their favorite video sharing site and its team - Facebook and Twitter. It looks like both places are pretty new for YouTube with Facebook page functioning since March and the first Twitter update posted by YouTube on August 26.

Basically creating presence in popular social networks is a very logical move for a successful online business and we have seen such posts on blog posts by all types of companies - big and small, web 2.0 or traditional. Such activity is intended to make sure existing users will stay connected and interested as well as to bring some new fans into the game. The reasoning is quite simple: when people already use your site and read your blog, they will probably be willing to join the team behind the product elsewhere to participate in further conversations using the tools they already use anyway.

What’s more important, it is easier to cultivate a community around your product where people already spend time instead of trying to build the community from scratch within your own site. This is exactly why all the social media consultants and experts invariably advise all the companies to participate in activities on various social networks, like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or FriendFeed.

So YouTube’s move is absolutely logical and pointing people to the right places to connect with the website and the team is a very good idea. But unfortunately it seems to me that YouTube guys are doing something wrong with their social media presence.

I don’t even want to mention the fact that for some reason instead of simply providing the links for people to join their communities on Facebook and Twitter, they chose to first suggest people to create their accounts on Facebook and Twitter if they are not registered yet. Do they seriously expect someone to join Facebook or Twitter only to track what the guys from YouTube have to send their way? Sorry, both networks require too much dedication and people must have better reasons for joining. But this is a strange suggestion that is not really important and can be ignored as looking very much like they did not have more things to write and the post looked too short without detailed instructions.

What is important is that it looks like YouTube team definitely sees no value in conversation and invites people to join their social media presences only to listen and never to hear back from the people behind their favorite product. Is it fair for the people that grew accustomed to the fact that social media is about conversation? Honestly, I don’t think so.

While on Facebook it is not exactly clear what a conversation can be at all since the product pages on Facebook do not really encourage conversation anyway, Twitter is obviously a tool that should be used for two-way communications because of its nature. After all, anyone willing to listen to YouTube updates from their official blog and featured videos could very well subscribe to them via RSS feeds without bothering to follow yet another company on Twitter.

But YouTube behaves on Twitter as a classic lazy company with almost 14 hundred people following it and 0 people it follows back. To anyone familiar with Twitter it basically means that the company is not willing to listen back, only to speak - yet the number of Twitter updates addressed to @youtube is quite impressive with people suggesting features and reporting problems in the recent update process (but of course you won’t see any replies sent back to these people by YouTube):

Sure, it is much easier to get a few RSS feeds with news or featured content delivered to your Twitter account automatically than it is to identify people that listen and try to engage in a conversation with them. True, it will require efforts of a community manager and maybe the site with a popularity of YouTube does not even need to pay for any such efforts at all. But if you are not going to do it the right way, should you even start such activities at all?

I am almost certain that YouTube will hardly do anything useful on Twitter unless they change the approach to something more open and focused on people that try to talk to them, provide feedback and ask questions. Simply broadcasting what the company is willing to say is hardly the approach that will provide any value at all to YouTube users. We have all seen examples of companies achieving magnificent results in community building on Twitter - but never without engaging in a conversation with their customers.

So my main question is: until when will we see companies misuse social media to broadcast their information to everyone willing to listen without even trying to listen and talk back? After all, social media is about conversation and if you want to be heard, you will be better off listening yourself as well. Even giants should understand the rules if they want to play fair. And no, YouTube, in some cases broadcasting yourself is just not enough.