YouTube has been around for a while now, and we all remember the “instant hit” sensation that YouTube experienced when it started to become part of our modern vocabulary. The fact that YouTube is free, is available to anyone with an internet connection and creates a connection with the viewer through it’s “anyone can make their own video” marketing plan set it apart from other video sharing sites, who mostly hosted more professional and commercially-driven productions.
There have been thousands of stars born overnight thanks to the YouTube sensation and a little bit of personal creativity, but keep in mind that it takes more than just a good idea to get your video going viral on this most popular of video sharing platforms.
Think about things from the video viewer’s point of view:
1. You get to the YouTube site
2. You’re looking for something specific, so you search that specific term in the YouTube search field
3. You’re bombarded with hundreds of results, and it’s up to you to select the one(s) you find are most relevant to your search
With this in mind, it’s a no-brainer to market your video to the specific target market looking for the content displayed in your video. This may seem obvious, but next time you do a YouTube search, have a look at how many results come up that appear relevant, but once viewed, have nothing to do whatsoever with your search term. Why? Because just like it is with websites, there are people out there who want to bring in as much traffic as possible regardless of search relevancy. Consider these the bad apples of the search world. They waste their time optimizing and marketing products that aren’t relevant to searcher’s needs, and waste our time by having to rifle through nonsense results.
Though Google (YouTube’s parent company) has done well at cracking down on these people in the website search realm, it’s a little more difficult in the video search world as search engines can’t really read the content contained within a video, as there isn’t normally any textual or coded content that you’d normally find on a given website. So, it’s up to the video producer to ‘tag’ and title their video as accurately as possible, and up to the viewer to rate and provide feedback on the production.
As a video uploader on YouTube, there are a couple things that you can do to market your video properly:
1. Once you’re logged into your YouTube account and have uploaded a video, go the “Info & Settings” tab of that video.
2. Under “Title”, choose a short and descriptive title that accurately depicts the video you have uploaded. If possible, use your most popular keyword phrase in the title if it accurately describes the video.
3. Under “Description”, again use your most popular keyword phrase in a sentence that fleshes out the title of the video in increased detail.
4. Under the “Tags” section, input your most popular keyword phrases, and separate each by commas and spaces. I recommend keeping to less than 150 characters (including spaces) in the Tags section.
5. Choose the category that most accurately describes your video and not the one that you think is the most general and will bring the most traffic. The more specific the category that accurately describes your video, the higher quality the traffic will be that watches the video.
6. Click “Share your video with the world” to publish the video, and click “Save Changes” at the bottom.
These steps will help ensure your video is seen by the right people, and will help YouTube become a better service for everyone to enjoy.