Online videos are getting huge. In May of 2011, 15 billion videos were streamed on the Internet. And YouTube is, of course, the Grand Central Station of online videos. Every minutes, 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. That means that about two weeks of new content will be posted by the time you finish this article. Having a YouTube presence for your company is essential, but it’s very easy to get lost in the crowd. So how can you make your YouTube channel stand out?
Create compelling videos
With the likes of What Does the Fox Say? and Miley Cyrus’ YouTube videos getting millions and millions of views, achieving a noteworthy presence on YouTube may seem like an impossible task. But thankfully, these viral videos are not your competition.
The types of videos you should be posting are those that directly cater to your intended audience’s needs. The need your business fills should be the same need addressed by your YouTube channel. You can post how-to videos, interviews with people in your industry, an FAQ about your company/product, etc. Basically, if you can blog about it, you can create a video about it.
Make your videos findable
Making your YouTube videos pop up first in a search is crucial, not only for YouTube results, but for all over the Internet. Remember: Google owns YouTube, so popping up first on YouTube means you’re easily findable on Google as well.
To make your video more findable, you’ll want to focus on three key areas:
- Title – Make sure your title contains keywords that will bring you a lot of traffic, while also making sure it’s interesting enough to make people want to click on it.
- Description – The description is not the place to be stingy with your words. You’ll want to start it with a full URL and then pepper in as many of your keywords as you can. You can also include links to pages you want to drive traffic to.
- Tags – Go crazy here. Any possible word you can think of that would relate to your video, your business, your product, or your industry, include it here.
Customize your YouTube channel
Like anything else in life, the nicer your YouTube channel looks, the more credible people will think it is. You should give your channel a custom background to stand out from the herd. Given the massive amounts of people on YouTube, the generic designs YouTube provides are easy to spot and scream “amateur.”
Your layout of your channel can either be in Grid View or Player View. Choose Player View. Unlike the Grid View, the Player View allows you to choose one video to be set on autoplay at the top of the channel. More video views means you pop up higher in the YouTube results, so even if they pause the video when it starts to play, it still counts as a view.
Use annotations
One of the features you can add to your YouTube videos are annotations. Annotations are little windows that appear on your videos while they play. Annotations have a bit of text on them, and when clicked on, can link to other videos, playlists, channels, or to the subscribe button.
Annotations can be added after videos are already uploaded. This is handy when some information goes out of date on one of your videos. You can create a new video that updates the information and post an annotation over the old video that links to the new one.
Share your videos on social media
Another way to enhance the audience of your YouTube channel is to make the followers of you other social media accounts aware that you have a YouTube account as well. Share your videos on Facebook. Tweet about them. Blog about them. Every new video you post to your YouTube channel should go up on all your other accounts as well.
One site that many companies seem to neglect is StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon.com is a website where people simply click a button and are taken somewhere new on the Internet that would interest them. It recently surpassed Facebook for driving the most social media web traffic in the U.S. So make sure you submit your YouTube videos to them.
