The old saying “if a tree falls in the forest and no one sees it, does it make a noise” applies to your YouTube marketing strategy. The new social media saying goes, if you post a video on YouTube and no one sees it, did you really post it? Whether your video is an interview, a how-to, or a lesson, it behooves you to set it up for success so others can easily find it! Since we know that YouTube is the second most-used search engine (i.e., Google is first!) you can do the following things to make your video work harder on being found!
7 Tips to Be the Most Viewed YouTube Video
1. Optimize Your YouTube Video Title
Making sure your video has a title with a non-brand keyword is the first YouTube marketing tip. For instance, if you are posting an interview of an SAP TechEd Las Vegas video of social media tips, you would want to title it “Social Media Tips from SAP TechEd Las Vegas” instead of “SAP TechEd Las Vegas Social Media Tips. This type of title drives a higher ranking from Google. Also, make sure you place the word “video” at the end of your video. People who are looking for a video will typically include the word “video” in the search!
2. Tie Your YouTube Video Into Blog Posts
Readers love video, so make sure to link your video to a blog post. Your YouTube marketing strategy should always include syndicating your video to a blog post. Many readers will click the video link and help drive views to your YouTube accounts.
3. Use Your YouTube Description Area
A key YouTube marketing tip missed by most is using the description area under the video. Since YouTube is the 2nd search that most do not use is to create a 250- to 1000-word keyword-dense description is like honey for bees for Google search. This use is especially important since Google immediately optimizes your description. Make your video description work hard by using key words, name and anything else that describes your video! Make sure the key components of your description include:
- Your company URL
- Name of your company (after the URL)
- Links to your Twitter, Facebook and other social media properties
4. Call-To-Action
Tell your viewer what you want him or her to do in the body of the description! For instance, you may want to drive viewers to an event registration or to view more videos, then place a call to action in the description! Whatever the plan is, integrating a call-to-action is a key YouTube marketing tip and it’s one of the key things that is missing in most blogs and social media communication is the call-to-action.
5. YouTube Video Tagging
By including six tags in your video posting you will have a better chance to success, says Nick Papagiannis Director of Interactive/Search for Cramer-Krasselt, a Chicago-based agency (I attended Nick’s session at Social Media Week Chicago while I was on a social media speaking assignment at the same event). Even though you cannot publicly see these tags, you need to include them to help others find your video.
6. Video Sharing
Sharing is a key YouTube marketing tip to help you get to found, so optimize your setting to get found! Make sure to set your privacy to “public” and allow comments, comment voting, video responses, ratings, embedding and syndication. Once you set your posting settings, you’ll be set for success
7. Video Captions and Subtitles
Since YouTube videos rely on Java conversion it cannot be crawled by search engines, so by uploading a caption file, you enable Google to do what it does best – read and index a giant copy block! Follow these steps
- Transcribe video to a .txt file
- Break up speech with periods and commas to help Google to capture the captions properly. When no audio is available, use the annotations feature
If you use these seven YouTube marketing steps correctly then others will have a better change to see your videos so they can pass them on to help you build your viewership and following! So don’t lumber around (get the falling tree reference) and start to build your YouTube marketing strategy.
