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You may think a place where people go to watch funny pet videos isn’t the best place to advertise your business. “If I sold pet food, yeah,” I hear you saying. “But I sell auto parts.”

Before I can convince you to use YouTube to market your business, we have to talk about traditional advertising and how social media are changing advertising forever.

Traditional advertising is what Dave Evans, author of Social Media Marketing an Hour a Day, calls “interruptive advertising.” The ad has to “interrupt” you and get your attention. Then — and only then — can it deliver the advertiser’s message.

If you don’t believe me, remember the last time you watched TV? Don’t TV commercials interrupt you? What do you normally do when a commercial comes on? Do you always sit there and watch it?

How about reading the local newspaper? I don’t know about your paper, but my paper’s editors literally cover the bottom half of most pages with ads. And copywriters are taught to grab the reader’s attention within the first five or ten seconds!

In other words, most traditional ads are an “in your face” attempt to get your attention.

Traditional Media Versus Social Media

Compare this to a video ad on YouTube. “A video ad?” I hear you say. “I didn’t even know you could do that!”

I’m guessing there are many things you don’t know about YouTube.

How do you see video ads on YouTube? How would you find most advertising on YouTube?

Only when you actively search for it. Like using Google to search the Internet. Do you see the difference?

No more “interruptive” advertising. You only see ads that you choose to see. Why would you choose to see it? Because you have a problem and you’re looking for a solution.

“But I have to interrupt people, don’t I?” I hear traditional advertisers saying. “How else can I get their attention?

Why would you provide a solution to people who don’t have that particular problem?

Traditional mass media throw a single solution out to millions of people, most of whom don’t need it at that particular moment. Will they remember your commercial when they do?

Social media maintain a searchable archive of millions of solutions, created by people who have successfully solved a particular problem. And most people prefer to get their solutions from people they know and trust. Not Madison Avenue, which they normally distrust.

Advertising on Social Media

So here is how you advertise on YouTube and other social media. You upload your video ad to your Facebook Page or YouTube Channel. Then you rely on people’s natural desire to find a solution to their problem at the time they experience the problem. The first thing they will do is search for a solution.

They may call a friend or neighbor. They may get on the Internet. Or they may use social media to find someone they know who can recommend someone who has a solution to their problem.

Now they are actively seeking a solution to their problem. Do you see the difference between this and a TV commercial?

And they might be thrilled to discover that your company has solved their problem. And if your solution is best described in a video, they would be overjoyed!

After all, who wants to read a boring company report when they can watch a video?

If you want to learn much more about YouTube and how you can use it to market your business, please see my review of the book, YouTube and Video Marketing an Hour a Day by Greg Jarboe on Social Media Examiner.

If you’ve been thinking about using LinkedIn to build your professional career, you’ll be glad to know there’s a Dummies book for LinkedIn now!

LinkedIn For Dummies by Joel Elad will tell you everything you need to know about LinkedIn, in language you can understand. It is filled with screen shots, lists, and detailed instructions for doing everything from signing up and creating a profile to finding venture capitalists and angel investors to fund your startup.

Yes, you can even look for business financing on LinkedIn. The Answers section of LinkedIn has two appropriate categories for this topic — Startups and Small Business, and Venture Capital and Private Equity.

And if you’re looking for venture capital for your startup, you can even use LinkedIn to find experienced professionals for your “dream team.” With tens of millions of experienced professional members, LinkedIn should be the first resource you use to recruit a management team.

You May Have to Pay

There’s just one problem. In order to use many of the advanced features of LinkedIn, you have to pay. And some of the paid plans are quite expensive.

For example, the free version of LinkedIn, which is called the Basic Plan, only allows you to communicate with people who are in your network. And only one, two, or three degrees away from you. You can’t communicate with people outside your network and you can’t even see their full profile. All you see is their name and a list of their job titles and educational degrees.

And the cheapest paid LinkedIn plan is $250 a year. But on this plan, you can only contact three people outside your network per month. If you want to contact more people per month, you have to upgrade to a more expensive plan.

So it seems clear who LinkedIn is targeting their services to — large companies who are looking for employees. These companies can afford to pay thousands of dollars a year to search for people using specifically targeted keywords. They can see everyone’s full profile, even if the person is not in their network.

But for job-hunters, it’s a different story. Unless you’re willing to pay hundreds of dollars a year, you won’t be able to do very much on LinkedIn.

What You Can Do For Free

On the Basic plan, you can create a detailed profile, join groups, and build a network. You can post questions and answers. You can get daily updates from your network and your groups. And you can search for people and companies.

But your search may turn up very limited results. You can only see a detailed profile of the people in your network.

Suppose, for example, you hear about a company that has an opening for which you’re qualified. You may have posted your resume on Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder, etc. The whole point of networking is to find someone in your personal network who knows someone at that company.

So you might start by searching for the company on LinkedIn. Once you find it, you can see a list of their employees who are on LinkedIn. And theoretically, you could find employees who are in your network and use that connection to get your foot in the door.

I said “theoretically” for a reason. There are two major problems with this scenario. Many employees don’t include their name in their profile. Just their job title. And without a name, you can’t see any connections.

It’s possible that many companies don’t allow their employees to reveal personal information on LinkedIn. Or employees don’t want their employer to know they’re job-hunting.

The second problem? On the Basic Plan, you won’t even be able to see many of the company’s employees. Instead, you’ll see a dozen or so, and then a large button that says, “Upgrade to See More Employees.”

My Experience With the Basic Plan

I know this from personal experience. Because I’m an independent contractor, I tried to use this technique to find clients. I know which job titles in my target market are likely to be the “ultimate decision maker.” And I already had a list of companies in my target market.

So I thought all I had to do was pull up company employees, find the right people by job title, and see if I was connected to them. Then I could use my connections to be introduced to them.

Unfortunately, I’m on the Basic plan. When I pulled up one company on LinkedIn, most of the employees listed had no personal names. Only job titles. And apparently, LinkedIn needs a personal name to connect people.

So LinkedIn couldn’t tell me if these company employees were connected to me. And I couldn’t see the full profile of any employee. I couldn’t contact them through LinkedIn, and I couldn’t get a phone number or an email address.

So on the Basic Plan, the best a job-hunter can do is create a detailed profile that is keyword optimized. And then sit back and wait for a company to contact you.

Is LinkedIn For the Fortune 500?

But a Fortune 500 company that can pay thousands of dollars a year can actively search for qualified people by keywords and use their connections to learn more about those people before they even contact them. A LinkedIn profile is much more detailed than a resume. It even has room for a picture!

So LinkedIn may be the ultimate manifestation of the phrase “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

In fact, LinkedIn could be thought of as a sophisticated recruiting tool for the Fortune 500, not a networking service for unemployed professionals. Maybe that’s why there are over 130,000 recruiters on LinkedIn, according to LinkedIn For Dummies.

So if you work among the Fortune 500, see my review of Joel Elad’s book, LinkedIn For Dummies, in the social media ezine, Social Media Examiner.

If you’re job-hunting, you can also benefit from the book. Just remember that you won’t be able to do very much unless you sign up for one of the paid plans.

How are you using LinkedIn? Has anyone found a job using the Basic Plan exclusively?

Feel free to post your comments.