Your Business Guide to YouTube - Part I

What's All the Fuss with YouTube?

This is Part I of a series of Blogs

YouTube has evolved incredibly fast from its creation in 2005.  Originally a place to upload personal videos and share them, it is now a leading system as a search engine and advertising.  It has everything aspects for personal growth, social site, advertisements, entertainment, business and more.  But what is the big deal with it?  Why does your business not only need to be upload videos onto YouTube, but be actively engaging, creating, and moderating past, current, and future YouTube videos?  The following Blog will give you a small glimpse into the YouTube Playbook.

Vital Components

Subscribers, Key Aspect, Title, Tags, Description, Thumbnail

Subscribers

Your end goal on your YouTube account, whether you think it is or not, is to have have people subscribe to your account, such as this artist would want people to subscribe to him.  Subscribers are basically your loyal costumers.  They are people who will watch you videos more often and get notices when new videos are added.  The more subscribers you have, the more your videos are watched, and that then leads to higher rankings during searches. We decided to start our Places.Mobile Channel from scratch, so that you may follow along in the process of building a YouTube Channel.

Key Aspect

The key aspect to a video is what I will call the "pre-watch" phase.  A viewer should get a glimpse of a story from the title, thumbnail, and first one or two sentences from the description.  This allows the viewer to know what they are expecting in the video and drives them to watch it.  However, it's imperative that your audience does is not mislead, so make sure those components you advertised in the description, title, and thumbnail are true to the video.

Title

You want your video to be found, you want it to be watched, with the end goal for people subscribing to your channel.  In order for it to be found, we need to be very careful about what title you give it.  Most users of YouTube will be doing unbranded searches in YouTube (unbranded means a generic search).  For example, if we were interested in hunting in New York, you might do that as your search. This is called an unbranded search.  For a business like Cold Brook Hunts, who listed their video title "Cold Brook Hunts" would not show up in a search for "hunting in New York".  It might have been better naming it along the lines of "Adventure Hunting in New York".  Your business name will be remembered better if they enjoyed their interaction with you.

Tags

Your video Tags are vital for you being found and displayed as videos being suggested for further watching.  There are several things you need to keep in mind.  

1. For all of your businesses, you need a set of about about 8 tags you always use
1. Example: Cold Brook Hunts should be something like; Cold Brook Hunts, Hunting, Central New York Hunting, Hunting Preserve, Whitetail Deer, Elk, New York Hunting, etc.
2. Each video should have Tags specific to that video
3. Each Video Specific Tag should start broad and become more narrow/specific

Description

Descriptions are what explains the video to the viewers.

The first video clip has a Good Description because it
quickly tells you about Cold Brook Hunts and what to expect in the Video

The first one or two sentences are usually all that are displayed when someone searches you video.  Make sure those two grab the audience, explains what it is, leaves them wanting more, and has words that are valuable for a search.  You can make these as long as you want, but 4-5 sentences should be the max if you want to keep viewer interest.

Thumbnail

Thumbnails are the small pictures that show up when someone searches your video.  When you upload your video, YouTube will automatically choose one of about three screen-shots that it will use as a thumbnail.  Try not and use these.  You need to customize your own Thumbnail using some type of photo-editing software such as Corel PaintShop to create one that completes the story with the title and description.

YouTube

As you can tell, there is a lot to learn about YouTube, and a lot of management involved, but it is well worth it.  This is just the "front" of YouTube.  This was just so people will hopefully watch your videos.  Now what you need to know next is, how to keep them watching once they start.