YouTube vs Vimeo: How To Choose The Right Hosting Platform For Your Business
You may be looking to start generating video content since we will be social distancing for the foreseeable future.
That means you're going to have to figure out where to upload your videos and how to maintain your video library.
YouTube is great if you want to be a YouTuber, meaning your business model is making videos. In other words, if videos are your end product.
But if making videos is not your end goal and video is just a tool in your Marketing & Communications toolbox for accomplishing your business objectives, Vimeo may be a much better option.
YouTube is the second largest search engine, though, behind only Google.
So why would you choose Vimeo?
In this article, I show you the reasons why you might choose Vimeo as your hosting platform over Google and how to get the best of both worlds.
YouTube Pros
YouTube is the second largest search engine behind only Google.
According to Google, YouTube reaches more 18- to 49-year olds in an average week than all cable TV networks combined.
Vimeo Pros
YouTube is a social media platform. That means the purpose of YouTube is to keep people on YouTube so that YouTube can make money.
Vimeo, on the other hand, is a fee-based video hosting service designed to support the business objectives of its customers.
As a result, Vimeo offers a variety of tools and features that YouTube doesn’t.
No Distractions
Vimeo provides a walled garden for your videos.
The only videos that appear on the side panel of one of your videos are other videos from your library.
YouTube, on the other hand, will fill the side panel with all kinds of videos that are based on the search and viewing history of the person watching the video.
Remember, the purpose of any social media platform is to keep people on the platform, not to help you accomplish your business objectives.
To keep people on the platform, YouTube will present your viewers with whatever it can to pull them further into the YouTube rabbit hole. All those random videos are distractions that will pull people away from your content.
No Skipping
Vimeo allows you to disable the video player controls, which means people can’t skip ahead and have to watch the whole video.
This is a feature you can use as part of your automated marketing system that attracts the right people and screens out the wrong ones without you having to waste time and energy talking to them.
Here’s how it works:
You make a video that’s about ten minutes long that someone needs to watch in order to qualify themselves to schedule a call with you.
At around eight or nine minutes into the video, you tell them that they can use the button below to schedule a call.
The button doesn’t appear until the exact moment in the video when you want it to appear (and then it stays visible for the rest of the video). You can’t do this with a regular website. This functionality requires using a dedicated Landing Page platform that allows you to put the button on a timer before making it visible.
Most people are not going to watch an eight or ten minute video, so they’ll never see the scheduling button, which is perfect because those are the same people who would ask about everything you included in the video…things they would already know if they had watched the video!
This is an example of how Vimeo plugs into your automated marketing system that helps you make more money in less time.
When you have an automated marketing system that consistently generates a high volume of inquiries, you also want that system to screen out all but the best leads, which the “hide player controls” option that Vimeo provides can help your automated marketing system do.
No Ads
Vimeo is ad free.
Your viewers will be able to enjoy your content without being disturbed by intrusive, third-party advertising.
Publishing to Multiple Platforms
Vimeo allows you to connect to your other social media accounts and publish your Vimeo-hosted videos to those platforms.
That means you can publish any video you have in Vimeo to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and a number of other social media platforms, all with the press of one button.
This greatly simplifies the task of publishing videos across multiple platforms.
Email Capture
Vimeo has an email capture feature that you can use to build your email list.
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Re-upload Capability
Vimeo allows you to update a video at any time.
That means if you publish a video and there was a mistake in it or some of the information in it has changed, you can replace the video with an updated version. You can do this unlimited times.
The link will stay the same, so wherever you’ve distributed the video, the updated version is what your viewers will see.
I use this feature ALL the time. I have certain videos like the one below that I use multiple times throughout my website and I occasionally update the video.
All I have to do is re-upload the video and the new version plays wherever the old version was published.
With YouTube, there is no option to update a video.
If there is a mistake, you have to either live with it, or delete the original video and upload and redistribute the replacement version.
Being able to just update a video rather than re-email it to hundreds or even thousands of recipients is a tremendous benefit that Vimeo has over YouTube.
Annotated Video Review
With Vimeo, each of your videos comes with a review page.
“Your reviewers can also add time-coded notes, right in the video, to streamline your video review process.” (Vimeo)
This streamlines your editing process and makes is much easier for you and your video editor to arrive at the finished product.
And if you’re a business owner, not a YouTuber, you will eventually have someone else editing your videos.
Once you start making anything beyond the most basic videos, video editing is a such a major time-consuming task, it will cost you a lot more to do it yourself than it would for you to pay someone to deliver you a finished product.
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Support
With Vimeo, you are a paying customer. It’s a U.S. company with support operations out of New York City.
Whenever I’ve needed anything, they responded within two or three hours.
Organization
Vimeo provides a variety of options for organizing your videos to make it easy for you to package your videos to support your business objectives.
Vimeo allows you to present your videos in Showcases like the one below:
Vimeo allows you to present your videos in Channels like this one (click here).
Vimeo allows you to present your videos in Portfolios like this one (click here).
Vimeo also allows you to create chapters for your viewers to use to navigate longer videos, like this one (the blue dots are the chapter markers):
Selling
Vimeo allows you to sell access to your video content either as a lifetime purchase or on a rental / subscription basis.
More Features
Those are just some of the features that Vimeo offers that YouTube doesn’t.
Vimeo really is purpose-built for supporting your business objectives.
Best of Both Worlds
As you can see, Vimeo offers lots of benefits over YouTube, however YouTube has the tremendous advantage of being the world’s number two search engine.
So how do you decide which one is right for you?
Fortunately, you don’t have to. You can have the best of both worlds.
A very simple strategy is to post teaser videos on YouTube where you’ll benefit from YouTube’s search engine.
In the description box of your teaser video on YouTube, you post a link to the page on your website where you have the complete video available via Vimeo, like all the videos you see on this page are.
This strategy uses YouTube to drive viewers to your website where you have many more opportunities to engage your audience.
This is how you can use video as part of your strategy for building a customer habit around visiting your website.
