YouTube is one of the largest and most popular social media platforms on the web, and with 300 hours of content uploaded every minute, it can be challenging to avoid having your content buried beneath a mountain of cat videos and waterskiing squirrels. At Sparksight, we try to leverage our high-quality content to help advocate our business. With that in mind, I headed to YouTube Creator Day Austin, to hear from YouTube representatives and fellow content creators about how to ensure that our channel is optimized to generate value. What I found is that there are 5 key points to address to ensure that your channel is optimized to generate value, whether you’re focused on ad revenue, building awareness of a new product, or pursuing your dream of internet stardom.
1. Be Found
You can have hours of great content on your channel, but if none of it is found, then it’s really not doing you any good at all. Taking the time to give your video an accurate, punchy title, an intriguing thumbnail, and a clean description can be all it takes to elevate your profile and make sure that you attract viewers to your content.
2. Focus on View Time
This point cannot be stressed enough. YouTube has recently adjusted their protocols so as to value view time as opposed to raw views when ranking videos in YouTube search and offering suggested content to visitors. Thus, it is important that the description and title for the video are accurate, as you gain nothing from having viewers abandon the video 2 or 3 seconds in.
3. Utilize Playlists
It’s every content creator’s dream to have viewers who find a video on YouTube, enjoy it, and proceed to view all of the content on their channel. Make it easy for the viewer! Organizing videos into playlists of similar content can help to ensure that you retain your audience and win subscriptions.
4. Be Consistent
It can be tempting to post a variety of vastly different content so as to attract as diverse an audience as possible to your channel, but it is important to resist this temptation. A dedicated fan base of subscribers who watch all of your content is infinitely more valuable to you on YouTube than a bunch of one-off views of 5-10 seconds (See #2) Thus, it pays off to ensure that your content holds to a consistent format, quality, and schedule. For example, if you are managing your company’s YouTube channel with the goal of building brand awareness through humorous videos, use similar actors, with similar joke styles (don’t do one video with a PG rating and another that’s rated R).
5. Engage Viewers
Nothing helps you win subscribers and build your online profile like making your viewers feel involved in the content. This can easily be accomplished by leveraging info cards and inviting viewers to comment on the videos. For a bonus, you can set aside some time to write replies to the comments, just be sure to avoid getting bogged down in responding to the myriad inevitable negative comments that will appear.
YouTube is a very powerful tool that is often misunderstood, as many creators-especially managers of corporate accounts-can be tempted to simply post content in hopes that viewers will simply stumble across it. Take it from the experts at YouTube Creator Day Austin, and focus on these 5 simple tips to help you to leverage your Youtube channel to its fullest potential.
