Check out any of the millions of videos on YouTube, and you’ll find the overwhelming majority are pretty hastily-put together productions – just quick uploads to spread the word about a fun video for the sake of public production and not much else. However, if you’re a business, or an individual for that matter, looking to separate yourself from the pack, consider using YouTube’s free annotation tool in videos uploaded on their platform.
In short, YouTube annotations can be used to flesh out more about a particular video, add speech bubbles to actions or people shown in a video, or even to link the video in question to other videos or searches within the realm of YouTube.
To create and integrate annotations into a YouTube video, here is what you have to do:
1. Go to www.youtube.com and login to your account.
2. When logged in, click on your account name and select “My Videos”. This should take you to a page where the “uploaded videos” tab is selected.
3. Find the video in which you wish to create annotations, and select the “Annotations” tab below the video in question.
4. Drag the play head on the bottom to the point in time of the video where you’d like your annotation to start to appear.
5. On the right, you will have a choice of what type of annotation you’d like to integrate (you’ll have a choice between speech bubble, note, spotlight, etc.)
6. Once you know what type of annotation you wish to use, click that selection and it will appear in the center of the screen. You have the ability to enlarge the dialogue box at your will, and input the text you’d like to use. Remember, you don’t want to cover too much of the screen with the annotation as viewers won’t be able to see the content of your video very well beneath the annotation layer.
7. On the right, you have the ability to edit the text you’d like to be used in the annotation, as well as the start and end time of the appearance of the annotation. You also have the ability on-screen to input links in your annotation, change the color of your annotation, or even change the type of annotation you’d like to use.
Once you’ve inputted the content you’d like to use, save that to file and if satisfied with how it plays, go ahead and publish that. Remember, you can use more than one annotation (separately or at the same time) within the same YouTube video, so play around until you get the right combination of annotations in the frame of the video. Once again, make sure the annotations don’t impede too much with the play of the video – the delivery of the video content should be your first priority.