How YouTube plays a huge role in Ellen’s marketing

We love her for her dancing, her humour and her social activism. But Ellen DeGeneres is also a social media marketing guru, who usesYouTube, and nowEllenTube with aplomb. In fact,I-Digital have noted that her YouTube channel is more popular than Jimmy Kimmel’s.

So how does she do it? The secrets to her success seem to include:

Targeting an often ignored market (middle-aged women);
Giving her audience an opportunity to upload videos and be featured on social media or her TV show; and
Her love of sharing across social media platforms.

Ellen’s relationship with YouTube could be said to be a little symbiotic, with one fan site noting that whilst Ellen posts clips from her show onto YouTube, she also uses YouTube “as a tool to find performances and new ideas for segments for her show... She has also used YouTube to find artists to sign onto her music label, proving that she is constantly finding ways to expand her name and business. ” Adding to the social media prowess, Ellen will often share videos posted to her EllenTube and YouTube channels to her Facebook page, thus gaining more views, and directing people back to her channels.

And it’s obviously working. Ellen is sitting at number 12 on the Forbes list of theWorld’s Highest Paid Celebrities, with credit for this being directed towards the fact that “DeGeneres has long been savvy about where and how TV viewers are watching, capitalizing on the power of YouTube years ago.” This quote only serves to verify what we at SushiVid have long known – viewers, particularly millennials, are moving away from traditional television mediums.

But it’s not all about the money with Ellen. Recently a beautiful video was posted on EllenTube of ayoung girl serenading her mother, who is suffering stage 4 cancer. This was then shared on Ellen’sFacebook and the video has now been viewed over 27 million times. Ellen then invited the mother onto her show, with that video being posted to herYouTube channel. If you haven’t seen any of these clips, you simply must grab your tissues.

Of course, there’s plenty of laughs at EllenTube too. The site was designed to be a positive and family friendly vehicle, where people could search for videos without fear of finding something dicey so you’re not going to be stumbling across the Top 5 Most Disgusting Videos there. As noted above, viewers can also share their own videos and stand a chance to be featured on the site, or Ellen itself.

So there you have it – Ellen has mastered the social media circle of life by embracing fans and sharing across her networks. What’s more, the goal is positivity – and we could all do with a little of that!

To draw on the spirit of Ellen, we thought we’d share just three of our favourite videos from her YouTube channel: