What you need to know about YouTube
https://vimeo.com/261462733
Remember the last time you cut out a recipe from a magazine and passed it to a friend? No, neither do we. People are increasingly using video to share and pass on information – whether that’s for personal and social use, or to explain an important business concept. Last year Cisco predicted that by 2020, video will account for over 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic.
It is also becoming an increasingly important influencer. According to recent research by Brightcove, almost half (46 percent) of viewers say they’ve made a purchase after seeing something on video, and a third (32 percent) say they’ve considered buying as a result of watching a video. (See our own experience with the video lead that led to a PC-12 sale).
Importantly YouTube is the second most popular social media platform – it is a search engine for videos. To rank higher, uploading fresh content is extremely important. YouTube ranks newly uploaded content and interaction.
“Watch time” is vital, too. High user engagement wins with its algorithm in identifying such videos. YouTube needs you to list the video accurately within hours of uploading it, so build your metadata is important. And what is metadata? We hear you ask. This is information about a video such as the title, description, tags and annotations.
Have your keywords, tags, title, description and custom thumbnail ready before you publish. A custom thumbnail makes your brand stand out – consistency is key. We have the same thumbnail style for each of our weekly videos. For keywords, search on YouTube, and also research in tools like Google Search Console, SEOProfiler, and Moz.
Create multiword tags (also known as long-tail keywords) that relate to your video’s exact topic. Choose one word tags that relate to its theme. For extra help there is great software out there. We like vidIQ and TubeBuddy, which give you information on your competitors’ YouTube videos, especially by showing the tags.
