As some people may or may not know, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Does your business have a YouTube presence? Every minute over 100 hours of video content is uploaded. With this in mind it can be difficult to get your video noticed. Below I have outlined some tips to make this process a bit easier and hopefully to provide a more comprehensive approach to using YouTube for video promotion.
There are no rights or wrongs to video promotion. What I mean by that is that your video objectives and budget will determine what style of video you can produce. There is nothing to say that a simple piece to the camera cannot be as effective a slickly produced video featuring a major celebrity. It might mean you have to work a bit harder to get it noticed.
Your video
The video itself is obviously the most important part of video promotion. You need to quickly grasp what the objectives of the video are, which people will want to watch it, what is the pertinent content required for the video and what people will want to see. Spend some time understanding these important aspects, as it is the key element to any video production. What type of video will it be? Company Profile, product video, with a voice over or presenter? How does the chosen type of video tie in with your overall objectives?
Creating a YouTube channel
So you have your video produced and it is ready to be shown to the world. The next stage should be to create a YouTube channel. Until recently there were quite a few options to brand your channel with your company’s imagery and information. This for some bizarre reason has been restricted, but there are still options out there for you brand the channel properly. You can add your website link, create a logo image and also a main banner image. Make sure you do these simple steps; otherwise the lack of effort will show through to potential customers. There is also the option to produce a channel trailer, but this option is more suited to a channel that is home to several videos.
Title/Description/Tagging
I can not tell you how many clients that I have given our expertly produced web video to, instructed them how to promote the video properly, for them to just upload the video and nothing else. I have one of many examples where the same video uploaded on our YouTube channels has had a lot more views than the client’s example. Simply spend a bit of time tagging your videos properly to gain maximum exposure for your video. Give the video a title that people will look for. What words describe the video accurately within the shortest amount of words? So instead of “ipad video.mov”, why not use “Advanced iPad video showing its unique features”.
The description section allows for a more detailed look at the video. Write a short paragraph explaining the video and include links to your website and other social media platforms so that the viewers can see other aspects of your work and have a call to action to work with. Tagging is extremely important, take some time to explore the most important tags, what tags do your competitors use? This is unlimited so use the available space but keep it in-line with the video’s message
Enhancing your website
As many people will embed their YouTube video onto their website, it presents an opportunity to further enhance your video. Don’t just leave your video on some obscure page. Maybe make a special banner with “come and watch our video” or something similar.
YouTube is notoriously bad for creating the image that you can use as the main picture for the video. This has changed recently but this is still really only an option for channels with a certain number of views. I have this option but initially I got around this on my website by placing an image over the top of the YouTube player. The image would disappear when clicked and the video would play as normal. This allows for the best quality imagery to be used and also added an element of SEO within the Alt Tag for the image. It also provides a short description below the video that can give the potential viewer a quick understanding of what they are about to watch. You could brand the image to give the viewer more information about your business and the video itself. An absolute must is if you are selling a product with the video embedded on your website, is to have the product video next to your selling portal.
Promoting using other platforms
There are so many other promotional platforms that you can use the video augmented by your YouTube. You will need to undertake a scoping exercise to see what is available to your business. These can range from something as simple as having a link to the video on your email sign-off to actively pursuing other suitable organisations to embed your video. buy youtube comments custom
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