April 24, 2012
Three billion, 800 million, 60. The number of hours of video watched each month, the number of monthly unique visitors and the number of hours of video uploaded every minute.
There’s no denying the consumer demand for quality shareable video content. And while it can be tempting to think of copy as the core content marketing tool for your business, the 100 million social actions taken on YouTube every week, pay homage to the brand awareness and conversion capabilities of quality video content.
Before getting bogged down in enormities, we’ve pulled together a selection of altogether more bite size tips to help you create successful YouTube videos.
1. What’s in a name?
In a nutshell, everything. It’s your video’s first call-to-arms and it needs to captivate and inspire the viewer. Give the video a catchy headline that summarises the video’s content and make it short and snappy. Long headlines lose interest. And don’t forget to pepper with optimised keywords to help the search algorithm match your video to relevant search queries. This is equally true of the video’s description – try to incorporate relevant keywords into the first couple of sentences and make sure the description gives a concise, relevant explanation of what viewers can expect to see.
2. Nail that thumb
YouTube selects the exact mid-point frame of a video and uses this as the thumbnail. This is the first thing a viewer sees before clicking through to the video and it’s also the image that features in Google search results, so it needs be visually engaging. As reported by Digital Telepathy, Yobongo saw a 70.9% increase in conversions when they changed their video thumbnail. YouTube will always give a small selection to choose from and a simple play with video editing software will enable you to modify the mid-point frame to make it more powerful.
3. Content is king
Does the video engage, inspire, inform, entertain? If it falls flat on all four fronts, then no amount of post-production will plaster over this. Keep it short, shoot in HD quality and always view it through the eyes of the consumer.
4. No comment
While it can be tempting to disable YouTube comments for fear of video vandalism, these are a valuable means of gauging consumer sentiment and understanding what works well and what doesn’t. Just remember to set email alerts up so that offensive comments can be quickly spotted and removed.
5. Spread the word
Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, VEVO, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, Digg, Delicious. There’s no end to the social networks ready and waiting for your video content to be shared across. And there’s no end of social networkers ready and waiting for video content to share.