How-Tu Tuesday: Making The Most of Your YouTube Channel

YouTube is now the second largest search engine in the world, with Google taking the first spot. This not only says a lot about the popularity of YouTube itself, but also the huge levels of popularity and views that video content now attracts online. Furthermore, this popularity is growing at phenomenal speed with multinational technology company, Cisco, predicting  that by 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic and video-on-demand traffic will almost treble in size.

When it comes to potential reach, YouTube receives more than 1 billion unique visitors per month, which is more than any other social media platform – apart from Facebook. The Guardian reports that 1 in 3 Britons view at least one online video a week, which totals a weekly audience of more than 20 million people in the UK alone.

All of these statistics point towards a need for marketers to be viewing video content as an essential component of their marketing and social strategy. Check out our top tips for making your YouTube channel the best it can be.

1. Strategise

For most ambitions in business, a strategy is required, and video content is no different. Before you start producing videos, you’ll first need to think about which aspects of the company you want to show on the channel; what do you want your YouTube channel to communicate to people who subscribe and watch your content? Why would they choose to re-watch and share the video?

There are a number of videos you may decide to film due to their relevance to the brand. This may include how-tos, product demonstrations, client/employee testimonials, trend recaps, audience polls/statistical reporting or illustrative animations.

When creating the strategy for your YouTube channel you’ll need to think about the schedule, production requirements, delivery of content and it’s promotion.

2. Create

Once there is a strategy in place, your channel can be set up ensuring it has a sleek branded appearance, with the logo, profile information and social icons all set up correctly.

The quality of your content will be what makes your channel either stand out in its field or disappear completely. With 300 hours of new video content being uploaded to YouTube every minute, the competition for views is extremely high. Efficient, good quality equipment and editing software is imperative for a professional finish that will be essential to your success.

3. Optimise

After uploading your content, you should use the following YouTube features to fully optimise your reach:

• Calls-to action: include a subscribe button on screen, links to everything mentioned in the description box below and feature clickable links to your previous videos once the current video has ended
• Annotations: these can be used to add background information, highlight calls-to-action and emphasise links from within the video (e.g. “Click me”)
• Thumbnails: always ensure you have a quality thumbnail that clearly depicts what the video is about. This will greatly increase views and search engine click-throughs
• Video tags: make use of relevant and accurate tags based on what your content is about. Using strong keywords that can be picked up by Google will again increase views and help boost SEO
• Playlists: create topic-specific playlists which will not only encourage users to stay on your channel and browse through your library of videos, but it is also linked with increasing engagement and creating a relationship with subscribers
• Conversation: there are two main ways to create conversation through YouTube; updating current videos and notifying users when this happens, or replying to comments both on your channel and individual videos. Ensuring that all comments are replied to or acknowledged in some way shows the brand’s human side, which is a very important aspect for all social networks

4. Promote

Build as many audience touch points as possible. This includes cross promotion on all social media platforms where you have a presence. You should encourage users to share your videos on Facebook and Twitter, thus letting users know to also follow you on these networks and vice versa; you should promote and share videos on all other platforms, spreading the word that you have a YouTube video and create amazing videos. YouTube make it easy for you to share links to videos, but they also provide embedding codes, allowing people to watch your videos from within your website or blog

5. Analyse

Like all social media activity, it must be measured in order to be understood and altered accordingly. How do you know to keep doing what your doing or if you should head in another direction? To maximise your results on YouTube you should be looking at:

• Performance: the number of views you have, the number of minutes users spent watching your videos and the number of subscribers you have
• Engagement: likes, dislikes, comments, shares, favourites added, favourites removed
• Top 10 videos: this will indicate the type of content that is most popular