Most small businesses consider video-sharing to be hosted on just the most well-known sites, split into two kinds:
Traditional (horizontal) videos such as those in 16:9 format. These often can be longer-form videos and usually they are hosted on YouTube. Other longstanding video-sharing platforms include Vimeo, Dailymotion and a few others as well as uploading into a social media channel such as Facebook. Additionally, some small businesses prefer to self-host and use a low-cost service like Amazon S3 or even upload to a cloud storage with video playback features like Dropbox or Google Drive
Shorter, vertical-orientation videos such as those in 3:4 format. These typically get uploaded onto Instagram, TikTok, Facebook Reels, and - now - YouTube’s “Shorts” section
Regarding the first kind, the traditional / horizontal longer-form video, most small businesses have skipped over using another video-sharing site: Rumble.
Rumble offers several benefits to small and local businesses for their online video marketing efforts. In no particular order, you can benefit by:
Having lower competition when a keyword (search phrase) is entered. If you optimize your videos properly then you have good odds of ranking in the top videos on the first page, even there is a significant amount of competition for the same exact search in YouTube.
Rumble’s video descriptions allow for links, and these are now getting recognized (“indexed”) in search engine results such as Google. The links also can help boost search rankings for your website or secondary web pages such as a favorable press release about your business. This latter method is called “tier 2” SEO link building.
Rumble’s video settings permit references back to the exact same video on YouTube, should you have uploaded the video there first. This “co-citation” enables the search engines to see that Rumble is an extra point of distribution and give your video extra benefit by citing the YouTube version as the original source for the video.
Videos in Rumble now are getting visibility in Google Videos, Bing, and now also getting indexed (sourced) in AI tools like Perplexity
Rumble’s audience may be different than YouTube’s for your specific industry. Some people no longer trust YouTube after what they consider to be censorship, copyright strikes which were unwarranted, and similar reasons. You also can find a more “patriotic” audience in Rumble, but that isn’t always the case for all categories.
Here are some quick examples of how various businesses can use Rumble:
A dog car seat cover manufacturer can use Rumble to target more “patriotic” types who drive pickup trucks (such as the Ford F-150) who own dogs. This would be in addition to the SEO, page 1 Rumble ranking, link building, and other reasons mentioned.
A small business selling high technology marketing and experience design solutions to major corporations, pro sports teams, and nationally known organizations can use Rumble similarly to the above example. The difference is that certain organizations and companies will treat a presence on Rumble with higher priority, so the experience design studio may get first consideration instead of it was just found in YouTube. This video is an example of the kinds of organizations with which it deals on a consistent basis:
A local HVAC company in the suburbs of a major U.S. city could use Rumble more for pure local lead generation. This would be to comment on videos of local businesses, knowing a comment on another local business’ Rumble video may stand out and get more attention than a corresponding comment on the same video uploaded on YouTube. Also, the HVAC company could optimize its video content and get #1 rankings in Rumble for its primary keywords for smaller towns it serves. The links from inside the videos’ descriptions then could help boost SEO in the main search engines themselves.
The same as above would apply to a local plumbing company looking to expand its services into growing towns West and South of its primary location. One additional thing which the company could do is to comment on real estate videos in Rumble for the towns where it wants more exposure. By leaving helpful comments, even with resources such as local plumbing codes and local historical flooding data, the prospective homeowners and curiosity-seekers watching the local real estate videos would become aware of the plumbing company. If the comments are helpful & courteous then this may build trust in the company’s brand - even if it doesn’t have a physical office in the new town to which it wishes to expand.
A tax professional who wishes to offer a specific service statewide, such as using AI to help with tax planning and tax strategies, then could post his video content on Rumble. He then could comment on videos pertaining to his state which deal with starting or growing (scaling) a business. The links back to his Rumble profile would build trust and potentially generate new leads from those people who otherwise wouldn’t know about his firm and/or wouldn’t know even about the new option, in this case AI for tax planning.
Of course, small and local businesses who don’t like YouTube’s practices/policies and/or don’t like the functionality of competing services like Vimeo and Dailymotion also may use Rumble in a “primary” way - very much like YouTube is the primary video-sharing outlet for most local and small businesses around the United States.
In future posts we may discuss decentralized/web3 video-sharing platforms. This will depend on the results from testing, ease of understanding by local businesses and small business owners, ability to rank in the search engines, if promised compensation by these platforms is as advertised, and if there are search engine benefits. Testing the platforms’ functionality, such as ability to play back video on Android vs. iPhone and specific laptop browsers, will need to be reviewed as well.
Please leave your thoughts on other ways in which smaller businesses which sell either nationwide or even locally can use Rumble in ways which benefit the viewers as well as the business owners themselves.