If I asked you to name a memorable Internet video from the past couple of years, you'd probably mention the one where Charlie bit his brother's finger or a parody song like All About That Baste.
But one viral video does not necessarily equal a successful YouTube channel. Truly successful YouTube brands have a strong subscriber base they interact with and publish online video content on a daily or weekly basis. So how do these brands break the mold and successfully navigate the vast sea of YouTube?
Billion-Dollar Market
Statistics around YouTube are staggering in scale. According to YouTube, there are over 1 billion users who watch more than 6 billion hours and upload over 4 million hours of video each month. With so many users interacting with YouTube on a regular basis, reaching viewers should be effortless, right?
Not so much. Many brands often just take the 'post and hope' approach to their YouTube strategy, figuring YouTube users will find their online video content through searches or social shares. This approach falls painfully short, mainly because the scale of YouTube is exactly why many videos are not surfaced, discovered, viewed or shared.
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To get your YouTube strategy right, it requires upfront effort, consistent engagement, and a defined strategy. How can your brand make its video stand out and get discovered within YouTube's vast network?
1. Get your videos found.
YouTube operates on a similar SEO algorithm to their parent company Google. This means keywords and phrases play an important role in content discovery and ranking.
How can your brand capitalize? Optimize each video's title, description and metadata tags with relevant keywords and long tail phrases relevant to your video and intended audience. In addition to YouTube's suggested tags, refer to Google AdWords campaigns to find highly-searched keywords or phrases. Include the most relevant within your video title, as well as the first two sentences of your video description.
YouTube also offers a couple unique tools to help your videos reach interested eyes. The first is YouTube's Fan Finder, which helps surface your videos at no cost by advertising your content during related searches and video views.
The second is a self-categorization step during the video upload process. By selecting the category that best represents your video, YouTube is better able to surface your video in related searches.
2. Keep the viewer's attention.
When it comes to indexing your videos, YouTube has increased the importance of viewer behavior when it comes to their video rankings and discoverability. This makes the behavior and actions of your audience arguably more important than keywords and metadata. For example, are your viewers engaged? What percentage of your video do they watch? Do they click on in-video annotations or to another suggested video?
The average viewing time is one critical key metric used by YouTube to determine the relevancy and quality of your video to your viewers. It is extremely difficult to increase the amount of time your viewers spend watching a video, but you can build a production strategy to promote longer views and higher retention. Keep your video introduction brief, quickly get to the meat of the video and visually engage your audience.
Behavior of the viewer after watching your video is also important to the video's discoverability and ranking. Do they click on annotations or end plate call to actions? Did they search another video to answer the same question? Did they subscribe to your channel? The viewer's proceeding action after viewing your video provides YouTube with a lot of insight into the relevance and quality of your content.
3. Adjust and tailor your content.
So you have a solid production, posting and engagement strategy, and are finally starting to see an increase in viewership and channel subscriptions. Now what?
YouTube constantly improves its search algorithm, so you should, too. Maintain fresh and relevant content, and always track the results in YouTube Analytics. This YouTube-created tool will give you hidden insights into your audience's behavior, demographics and engagement.
With a little effort, a curious mind and willingness to experiment, you can test new strategies and learn what topics or formats resonate best with your viewers. For example, Demand Media ran a video format test on our LIVESTRONG Women YouTube channel and found that our audience prefers to consume their content in distinct ways depending on the subject matter. Moving forward, we can adjust our production strategy to reflect these preferences and increase our viewer retention and engagement.
In other words, don't be afraid to experiment. Worst case scenario? You get a dud. Best case scenario is gaining insights that can shape your long-term strategy.
YouTube is evolving at a rapid rate, continuously reinventing itself to best fit user searches and behaviors. This means your online video strategy should evolve, as well.
In my experience, approach your YouTube strategy with an open mind, a willingness to experiment and a dedication to providing a great viewer experience. More often than not, this will naturally translate into more channel subscribers, higher view counts and increased engagement.
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