Today I spent the morning in the Soho Google offices with the team that work with YouTube. I was sent an invite to pop along to a workshop about how to make the most out of YouTube, how to create your brand identity and how to get the most hits. Naturally I could not resist this great opportunity, not only did I go along with my Television and Video Production student hat on, but also I went along with my Corporate Summer Student hat on and finally, clearly most importantly my vlogging hat on! Although I do not vlog myself, a lot of my lovely blogging friends do and I think this information could be invaluable to them! Anyway, enough of the chatting, here are some of the hints and tips I picked up!
The biggest thing they touched on was the idea of audience, sounds obvious right? But have you ever done some audience research? Think about the audience, what do they want to see, what do they want from videos? Click on your subscribers or the people who comment on your videos, check out their feed, what do they watch? What kinds of videos do they make themselves?
All YouTube videos are measured on "interaction" - videos that are the most successful are those who get the most likes, the most views but also the most comments. YouTube class success on how far up your video is listed. For example, if you search 'Mac Haul' on YouTube, the first one on the list will be the one which is the most successful.
Because of this "interaction" element in the rating of videos, YouTube encourages you to make every video have a call of action. Leave a question for your subscribers to answer, or something to do next, encourage them to leave a comment!
A really interesting point I noted was the idea of "bounce backs". YouTube measures how many times someone watches one of your videos and clicks off the page within 10 seconds. The more "bounce backs" you get, the further down the list you appear. Therefore they talk a lot about the first 15 seconds and the importance of capturing an audience. This sounds obvious, but do you sell your video in 15 seconds?
Get ahead of the game! Make your videos have relevance to the time or events around the world! YouTube call this "tent-poling" if it's valentines day, Christmas, easter, VIDCON etc, get a video up that will capture the time. People will search keywords around these times and this will get more people onto your channel.
Create a structure! If you're not uploading videos all week long, make sure your subscribers or viewers KNOW when a video is coming next. Make sure they know the time a new video will be available! Also sell your next video, if you know the videos coming next, tell your audience, create some hype!
The people at YouTube told us some great information about titles and descriptions. Treat your title and description like a newspaper.
- Title
- The 'headline' of the video, sell it quickly and efficiently, but be truthful, fake headlines will lead to bounce backs!
- First two sentences of your description box
- The 'tagline' of the video. When viewers search for a video, only the first two sentences show up in the results, so make them informative and useful, grab the attention.
- Rest of the description box
- The 'body/story' use this space to get the rest of the information you want to write. Use this space to say jibberish details! YouTube encourage "deep linking" - write down the rest of your social network links and blogging links in the description box!
The tag section of the YouTube upload page is PURELY for YouTubes database, they use tags to pair your video to other similar videos. So if you want your own videos to come up in the "watch next" section after your video finishes, make sure all your VIDEOS have the same set of tags every single time you upload. This will encourage YouTubes system to pair your videos together!
If you don't use "spotlighted annotations" in your videos make sure you consider it! Link viewers to your own videos within your own video! Make a holding page in your edited video, for example a thumbnail of another video you want people to watch and then upload your finished edited video. After the upload, click annotations, select spotlight mark the thumbnail in the video and put in your link!
The final piece of knowledge you need to know is about YouTube partners, if you become a YouTube partner you can earn cash, get a background image and some branding on your channel! To do this visit YouTube.com/yt/creators and apply!
Hope you found you this useful, sorry if you know some of this, but I hope you learned something of use, please share this and help others make the most of YouTube!
