The use of video online continues to grow in leaps & bounds. With the explosion of YouTube a few years ago and the advent of broadband, Wi-Fi, and the latest in mobile technology, creating and viewing video online is within almost everyone’s fingertips 24/7.

But if you are a small business, how can you use video?

First thing is to get an account of a couple of the various video sites out there.  Two I like are YouTube and Viddler.

YouTube is great for the instant hit.  Most people have heard of it, you can view its content on the iPhone, but with that is the danger of being lost in the “noise” of everyone else’s funny videos of cats.

Viddler has a smaller community but some great tools such as putting your branding/logo on the video whilst uploading and allowing people to tag and comment on the video at certain points as it plays.  Gary Vaynerchuck uses this to great effect for Wine Library TV.

Once you’ve got your business/product/brand account set up, the next thing to do is get some content up there.  If you’ve appeared on TV there’s a good chance you can get that footage and re-purpose it using one of these accounts. Then embed it on your site.  I helped CareerComm do this recently with Tina’s appearances on NewsNet 5.

You can also use video to highlight products or give tours of your work. Remember, as with everything online, be yourself.  Nothing cries out FAKE than ill fitting suits and stilted dialogue.  Allowing the videos to be embedded (placed on someone else’s site) or shared through social networks, is also a great way to spread word-of-mouth marketing online.

Technorati tags: video, youtube, viddler, marketing