Establishment on YouTube : Catchphrases, communities and user involvement

Abstract: YouTube is a great place for attention and discussion. Individuals and companies canuse the context and the system for branding of their content. Previous research in thearea has had a larger focus on mass statistics and social patterns on YouTube asequations, rather than as a social platform with people using it. Our research focusedon the users and why they choose to involve themselves with the content of theSwedishMealTime channel on YouTube and what we could do as a producer to createa more established channel, since we run it ourselves. This gave us an opportunity toextract data from the statistics on both YouTube and the corresponding Facebookpage of SwedishMealTime. We sent out an online survey to our subscribers withquestions revolving around the channel and content, in order to gain more insight ofwhat kind of content they prefer. A netnographic study was made in combinationwith a survey to collect the data for the analysis. Our results suggest that a regularupload scheme, communication and interaction with subscribers and establishment ofthe channel increases the sense of belonging, which in turn increases the exposure ofthe channel and the number of users subscribing to it. Future research will requireinformation about more channels, to identify behaviour between them, and if thereare any patterns for a viral success.