Customer review videos are watched 1 billion times a day on YouTube. With this in mind, I'll be giving 5 reasons as to why YouTube is the best place to collect customer feedback, for both consumers and businesses.

1. YouTube Video Reviews are better than text reviews.

Firstly, videos get more engagement than text online. Social video Posts with visuals receive 94% more page visits and engagement than those without. What is stronger than a text based review? How about a video of your customer talking about how your products or services have helped them? Encourage your fans to add videos to their own YouTube account so you can learn and increase your brand awareness. Worried about whether the review will be negative? So what, if it's negative, you can easily respond to ensure that not only the current but other users too see your commitment to making improvements and changes. This sort of transparency has worked wonders for Buffer. This sort of communication will do wonders for your net promoter score as well as customer loyalty. If you have a strong YouTube channel to begin with, people will be happy to be featured on it in exchange for their thoughts. Imagine how easy it'd be to share positive feedback? Compare this to dealing with boring online customer surveys which have low response rates already for example. So maybe the reason why your customer survey response rates are low is because people would rather respond to videos instead! A great example of a customer review video collection is the Experience LG channel which has customer reviews for their mobile phones and computer products.

2. YouTube influencers are deemed as trustworthy and incredibly relatable.

YouTube has become a trusted resource for many people on the Internet. Viewers trust their YouTube stars to give them all manner of how-to advice from makeup tutorials and craft projects to cooking and furniture making. According to a new study from BuzzMyVideos and OnePoll, YouTube influencers generate the most trust with product reviews. In a nutshell, many customers (including potential) will increasingly go to video platforms like YouTube to see a review of a company's product before buying. The majority of survey respondents said they were more likely to buy a product they saw in a positive online review, and more than 42% believe YouTube to be the most trustworthy source of product reviews. You can leverage this information by also going to learn from these YouTube influencers.

3. YouTube videos are easy to work with. Easy to then follow up on, case study or use as testimonial.

Firstly, videos are easy to share and digest.The internet is the best place, especially for customer feedback. With social video platforms like YouTube, once you have the feedback, it's very easy to then follow up with it. As said earlier, if a YouTuber has said a positive feedback, fantastic! You can use it as a testimonial on your site or in a marketing campaign. If it's negative, you can quickly address the pain points and take actions accordingly.

4. Customer surveys, focus groups, online polls etc are just boring and out of date.

Increase in survey abandonment is not going to slow down, not at this rate anyway. Customers prefer to vent their views online for their subscribers and the world to see. Social media is the number one way for customers to communicate with brands. This is no different for feedback. Survey response and completion rates are decreasing and there's no slight indication that this will change. Videos however are seeing the number of responses increase dramatically with no hint of it slowing down. Focus groups cost too much money, it's much better and cheaper to host a video channel asking for feedback than pouring out thousands on a 1 hour focus group session or on advertising an online survey.

5. Videos themselves are the future. This is just the beginning.

Posting video content is still growing - most social media platforms have realised that the world is moving to video and are trying to make steps to keep up. We've recently seen Facebook include video conferencing in their messenger and Twitter introduce live video streaming through Periscope. If these massive companies are innovating to accommodate the revolution then we all should. Again, videos already get the most views and engagement online, way more than polls and surveys. Companies with regular video content show up more in search rankings than companies with just text content. Why not capitalise on this paradigm shift and emerge as a market leader during the video revolution before it's too late?

Next steps

Alright, so you like the sound of this, now what? In terms of getting feedback from review videos, while it is time consuming to watch all these videos or contacting all these influencers yourselves, given the right technology it is possible to extract the feedback from all these videos in a quick and elegant manner, making it easy for companies to understand how to keep their customers happy and paying. One such technology is Sentview which helps companies better understand their customers by obtaining customer feedback from review videos posted on social video platforms like YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook. Others are Social Mention, Hootsuite and TweetReach which are all very popular for notifying companies about when they're tweeted or mentioned online in general (as text). The one that's best for you depends on your needs. Sentview is great for extracting the customer feedback from the videos themselves. Social Mention is great for obtaining the comments on places like review sites, likewise with Hootsuite and TweetReach is great for obtaining feedback in the form of tweets.