While YouTube has evolved into a highly useful marketing tool in recent years, the analytics offered natively could definitely provide more information to those looking to make the most of their videos. That’s where new service VidIQ comes in. The startup opens to the public today and is announcing a funding round in excess of $800,000.
VidIQ is positioning itself as a kind of HootSuite or Buddy Media for YouTube. While it has previously been available as an enterprise-focused product that counts AOL, Mondo Media, and Revision3 among its customers, today it’s opening to the public as a service that anyone can sign up for.
There are a few different elements to the service. Firstly, social analytics; the service allows users to identify ‘super fans’ in their audience (based on their Klout score, YouTube subscriber count, engagement metrics, and the like), discover people talking about their videos on Twitter, and see metrics for Facebook Likes, tweets etc for their videos.
Beyond that, there are SEO-like tools that YouTube power users will appreciate. You can optimize video tags to take advantage of search trends on YouTube, discover the best time to post your videos, bulk-edit existing descriptions (for example, to promote a new one) and monitor the click-through rate on those descriptions. There are also tools to moderate YouTube comments centrally and sync a YouTube channel with a Facebook Page.
In short, it’s an incredibly useful YouTube toolbox. Here’s the company’s promotional video, complete with the unusual choice of a British voiceover artist:
San Francisco-based VidIQ is co-founded by Rob Sandie and Todd Troxell, who were previously the co-founder/CEO and Chief Architect respectively of business-focused video platform Viddler. Investors in the round announced today are Mark Cuban, TechStars CEO David Cohen, Scott Banister, Peter Weck, Tod Sacerdoti, Don Hutchison, Jared Kopf, Jason Seats, William Lohse, Savan Devani, Shriraj Gaglani, and I/O Ventures.
VidIQ is available in a free ‘Starter’ package that covers one user and one YouTube channel with a limited feature set. To unlock the full package that includes all the features, the ability to whitelabel the service and a dedicated ‘account strategist’, you’re going to have to get in touch with the company for enterprise pricing. Given that this will be most useful for those who make a living from from YouTube, or at least use it as a key part of their marketing strategy, that’s not necessarily going to be a stumbling block for the startup.
VidIQ is open to public signups now.
➤ VidIQ
Image credit: AFP / Getty Images
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