The use of video as an online marketing tool is the latest and greatest way for a business to get noticed. However, he notes that the best platform for video marketing may surprise you.

If we are talking about video marketing by itself, there are nearly 100 reasons why YouTube is a more valuable platform for video marketing than Facebook. As an overall marketing platform, however, Facebook is definitely more valuable than YouTube for many businesses.

In other words, online marketers would never treat Facebook video as if it had an equivalent business value to YouTube, but it should be a place where businesses upload videos.

Uploading videos on Facebook is just as important as uploading them to YouTube simply because of the sheer volume of users that Facebook draws each day. According to reports, Facebook is the second largest website in the world, with more than 500 million active users and Facebook is also the second largest referral source for online video behind Google.

However, Facebook has a long way to go before truly dominating the online video market.

Video is currently integrated directly into the Facebook interface. When you update Facebook, there's an option to click and record a video from your computer's webcam. Unfortunately, most people don't use it, and those who do find that it results in very poor technical quality.

Additionally, many people have trouble deciding whether to use YouTube links on their page or actually upload video directly into Facebook.

If you embed a link to YouTube, it will embed the player directly into the Facebook feed. When you upload a video directly to Facebook, however, you can support more formats and the videos posted can be significantly longer.

Like everything else on Facebook, the best part of using Facebook as a video marketing platform is the fact that other users can easily share the videos you post.

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Too often, companies do not design their website for their customers. Instead, most companies take an egocentric approach to website design, and spend most of their time talking about themselves and their products, rather than serving the needs of their customers.

If a business's website does not serve its prospects and customers, then it is not serving the business either.

The best way to create a consumer-focused website is by first figuring out who the business's most profitable customers are and target that niche audience. The smaller the business's market, the more profitable it will be.

Next the business must understand its customers' needs and motivations and cater to those needs through the content of the business website.

Customers are typically not visiting a business website to kill time. They are there to solve a problem, find a specific product or hire someone to perform a specific service.

A website's home page is not the cover a best-selling novel. If it is static, devoid of useful, clear and concise information, it will spell failure for the website.

A business's website home page should clearly communicate what the company has to offer. Businesses should focus on their customers' needs and guide them through the website toward the information that can best help them.

Last but not least, business websites should be an educational tool for visitors.

A business should complement its product and service information with valuable educational content that helps customers to make more informed decisions through 'how-to' articles, best practices guides, training videos and other educational content. This type of content can turn a website into a resource center that customers will visit regularly, because it is so helpful.

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Having a massive list of friends on Facebook or a bunch of followers on Twitter is just the beginning of the power that social media marketing can yield. Yet, leveraging the power of these social networking giants isn't always easy and, if not executed properly, a business's tweets and Facebook updates will simply end up lost in a sea of information.

It is important for businesses to understanding why people use specific social networks if they want to be successful in using them as a marketing tool.

The problem is that everyone gets so hung up on the social network itself, that they abandon the real goal, which is getting people to their website to interact with the content that they have to offer.

The key is for businesses to have 'real world' targeted connections.

On Facebook, for example, it is possible to build a friends list to specifically target information to relevant connections. When announcing new content on a website, use that friend list to send out the information to ensure that messages do not get lost in the constant stream.

Targeting an audience is the key to online marketing. Search Engine Optimization comes from those who follow the link, he says, and if the information is relative to their interests, they will stick around and even repost or take other action to help create more relevant traffic.

This is why so much online content offers a call to action such as a re-Tweet or Facebook Like button. It makes it so easy for the reader to send out a link to the rest of the people in their network. This sort of link building is priceless.

The bottom line is that the importance of social media marketing is not the social network itself, but the power to target a relevant audience.

When a business grasps this concept, it makes it much easier to put together a strategy centered on bringing people to a website, rather than substituting it with a social network.

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