New York SBDC Research Network

From MarketingProfs : Video plays an important role in driving consumers' purchase decisions: 79% of consumers say they would be willing to spend more money on a product after they watch a social media influencer's video about it, gen.video has found. So using your YouTube channel could be a perfect option for you to drive sales. At the same time, you may face some challenges in converting your subscribers into customers. In this article, you're going to learn three ways to turn YouTube subscribers into valuable customers. However, you still need to keep the basics in mind, such as adding a clear call to action at the end of the video, prompting subscribers to take the desired action. You should also include easy access to a relevant landing page to drive conversions. You could embed the link in the form of a button at the end of the video.

Some are barely more than a minute. Some take an hour or more. While some are highly technical, others are very user-friendly. There are talking heads; they are graphic intensive. We're talking about learning about bookkeeping online. Even if one delegates the day-to-day task to someone else, every entrepreneur needs to understand the basics about the financials of the business. Enter YouTube, which has about 66,000 videos that help businessperson with bookkeeping and accounting. Peruse at your leisure to see which ones resonate the most with you. I DO need to mention Introduction to Accounting from SBA.

SBA's YouTube channel has a variety of playlists and how-to webinars. Here are a few recent webinars that you may have missed, but can watch any time on demand: Making and Receiving Online Payments - Online and Mobile Making Your Small Business Workplace LGBT-Inclusive Social Media Marketing Made Simple

If you’re not using video in your social media marketing, what are you waiting for? The engraved invitation came back in 2006 when Google bought YouTube. In 2011, YouTube passed Yahoo to become the world’s second-largest search engine. Video is a powerful tool, and leveraging it correctly can yield amazing results for your social media marketing. Social media video is hugely popular and includes everything from Vine (Twitter’s 6-second mobile video app) to long-form videos on YouTube. According to research by Pew Internet, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Video-sharing-sites.aspx 71% of online Americans use social media video sites (and that study was conducted in 2011—the percentage has likely increased since then). A picture is worth a thousand words so the cliché goes and a motion picture is priceless, which is why Pew Internet described videos as “social currency” when they reported in 2012 that 41% of adult internet users share and repost videos on social media. More from

n his book, The Back Of The Napkin, author Dan Roam asserts that that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, but that we — especially in the business world — are never encouraged to develop it. In this video, Roam shows us how anyone with a pen and a scrap of paper can exercise their imagination and work through any business problem by creating pictures.

Social Media Makes Lousy Customer Service a Very Costly Proposition

SBA is teaming up with Visa to ask small business owners: “Where will your next customer come from?” To recognize successful small exporters and increase awareness toward federal assistance for exporters, SBA is sponsoring its Export Video Contest. The contest, presented in partnership with the National Export Initiative and Export.gov, will award monetary prizes to five successful small business exporters representing a variety of industries. American small businesses looking to expand are going global. There are a number of advantages to exporting: reaching new customers, increasing sales and profits, and becoming less dependent on domestic demand, to name several. In fact, over two-thirds of the world’s purchasing power is based outside the U.S., where the vast majority of consumers reside. The U.S. government stands ready to help your small business get started in exporting, with an array of programs, tools and resources. More HERE .

From a listserv post from Laura Young of Austin Ventures: Business apps - there's a "great one" for scanning business cards and an app search engine . There's also a recent PC Mag article about business apps for iPad . And a pretty good YouTube video about Business Apps .

On a non-small-business-related note, this blog post from Wired cites the new channel on YouTube that's hosted by the Library of Congress. The LoC has an extensive film and video collection, but only 70 such items are currently available on YouTube. However, it's pretty cool to see the first recorded image of a human being in motion (from Thomas Edison's archives). More stuff from LoC will follow. For now, a pretty neat novelty. And now, back to the business of our blog . . .