We've talked before about using YouTube to promote your business.Increasing numbers of people go to YouTube as a source of information early in their research and decision processes. Many find video reviews of products more convincing than ads. Millions use YouTube for recreation and learning.

What's more, having uploaded a video to YouTube, you can then easily embed it into other websites, including your blog, your Facebook page, or your Squidoo lens. Other people can do the same -- persuading a few dozen staff members to upload your video to their Facebook pages or blogs can give you lots of immediate links, and creating a video that people like well enough to embed in their pages without your asking can give you valuable levels of free publicity.

Say you've gone that route, though, how can you tell what kind of results you're getting? Certainly, when your customers tell you they want that item they saw on YouTube, you've got a hint. But there's more data available.

YouTube now collects and shares with you information about  your videos. Just sign in and go to your videos -- the ones you've uploaded -- and you can see a number of possible actions to take. You can play, delete, or annotate your video, and there's also a button labeled "insight." This is the button that tells you who's viewing your video.

Click on "insight" and you'll see these buttons:

Views tells you  how many people have looked at your video. You can ask to see how many viewers there are in different countries and regions, and you can check on relatively popularity in different countries. You can also check a box saying "show unique users" which will tell you how many different people (or at least different computers) watched.

Discovery tells you how people found your video: by searching at YouTube, by watching it on a viewer embedded at another site, by following a link online, by watching it after seeing a related video, or by clicking on a link in an email or IM.

Demographics tells you  the ages of the people who viewed, and whether they're male or female. As you can imagine, this isn't very precise, and a new video may not have enough information to guess, but it can give you an idea of what groups are paying attention to your video.

Community measures how people are repsonding to your video,  for example by commenting or uploading a video response, and where in th world the people who respond are.

Hot Spots shows viewer activity. It will, for example, let you know that people are only watching part of your video, or that they're rewinding to see a favorite section again.

This gives you some valuable market data, as well as allowing you to see your video's popularity.

If you're not yet using video for promotion, and you're beginning to think it's time, contact Onsharp about creating a promotional video for you.