YouTube is not just a portal for uploading and viewing video content, it’s an online community. Research shows that YouTube outperforms other social media sites in both time spent on the site and the number of pages per visit.

This means that all brands should be considering how they can utilise YouTube videos to increase brand awareness and engage with potential customers. Just like other social media sites, YouTube offers brands an opportunity to build relationships and spark conversations with users.

With over 100 hours of footage being uploaded to YouTube every minute, it’s more vital than ever for businesses to utilise this online communication resource and maximise its opportunities.

1. Create appealing content


Simply shooting a video and uploading it on YouTube by default may end up destroying the benefit you could be receiving from your content. Making compelling and interesting content is the best way to attract viewers to your YouTube channel.

Focus on keeping your content consumer-centric and keep the brand message in the background. Videos that are emotionally captivating, unique, entertaining or useful are more likeable and share-worthy. As consumers enjoy your content they will be encouraged to show the video to others, accelerating the virality of your videos.

YouTube also rewards channels and videos that keep users watching, so creating content that keeps users engaged has never been more important!

2. Think about your channel strategy

Since the role out of YouTube One Channel, the site has become more “Channelized”. This change means that rather than creating a one-hit wonders, you should instead focus on creating a coherent strategy for your channel. If you create a consistent channel that regularly posts compelling content you will increase subscribers and make your channel a success of YouTube.

3. Optimise for SEO

Metadata is highly important to the success of your YouTube campaign as it affects the discoverability of your channel and videos. When uploading videos to YouTube you want to achieve a good balance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Attention Grabbing Optimisation (AGO).

Title

This will be your video’s headline, so make sure it’s compelling. Keep keywords at the start and branding at the end.

Avoid using a title that misrepresents your content. Tricking users into watching your videos will negatively impact both rankings and watch-time performance.

Description

Only the first few sentences of your description will be displayed in the search results. Even though only a few sentences will be displayed in results this doesn’t mean you have to be stingy. Be as precise and keyword rich as possible, without keyword stuffing.

You can also include links to related videos, your channel, your main website and your social media presence to increase user engagement.

Tags

Include all relevant keywords that will help users find your content in the tags field. Use a mix of general and specific keywords making sure you accurately describe the video.

4. Share your content

As Sesame Street taught us, sharing is good. There are many avenues that you can use to promote your YouTube content. Use the bulletin function on YouTube to notify your friends and subscribers of your new content. This function allows you to attach a link to your video and post it in the subscribers’ feeds, drawing extra attention.

Posting your video to other social media sites is also a great way to attract more viewers. You can reach a much larger audience on sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as encouraging followers and fans to share your videos.

Try to think of surprising ways to share your videos on social media. Rather than responding with text based replies to questions on Twitter, Warby Parker creates videos as responses to each question. Due to this innovative video sharing technique, Warby Parker have managed to double the engagement with their content.

5. Use YouTube’s free analytics tools for insights into your videos

It’s no good posting videos on YouTube and then forgetting about them. YouTube offers a suite of powerful analytics tools that can help you gather information on a single video as well as your channel as a whole.

By analysing your viewership, traffic sources, watch-time and other helpful information YouTube analytics provides, you will be able to assess which types of content resonate well with your target audience. This knowledge will help you to reproduce your successes as well as highlighting unsuccessful techniques.

As YouTube’s analytics tools are free, there’s no excuse not to monitor the performance of your videos!

By creating compelling and engaging content that is well optimised will help your brand to connect with potential customers and drive sales and conversion opportunities. Although success may not come over night, consistently creating great content can make your brand a YouTube superstar.

 

By Rob Norledge, Digital Media Services Director at MEDIAmaker. 

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