There’s no denying that video is the hottest form of content right now, especially with the emergence of live broadcasting that’s sweeping the internet through Facebook LIVE and Periscope.
It can be time consuming and expensive for companies to create video, but that’s only half the battle. The fact that you have a video is not as exciting to other people as it is to your internal team. So how do you make sure the right people actually see your video?
It comes down to two things – optimizing your video on YouTube so people can find it and distributing your video in the right way in the right places. Here are a few highlights for both of these areas.
Optimize Your Video
- It’s important to identify your target audience for the specific video and what problem they are trying to solve by watching your video.
- Research keywords for your video listing by using tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Google Web Master Tools and YouTube and Google suggest.
- Structure your YouTube channel as a homepage for your video content, with your playlists as your category level pages and your videos as your product or keyword level pages.
- Optimize your YouTube video summary using key words, with a strong title and robust summary. Link to your website using the full URL address and include a subscribe link.
Distribute Your Video
- Create a dynamic end screen where people can click through to your other videos and subscribe.
- Ask viewers to subscribe to your channel three times – in your video, on the end screen and in the summary copy. When recording videos, reference other videos you’ve made that your audience may be interested in.
- Consider YouTube paid advertising to target your specific audience when they are watching. YouTube has a number of paid options including video pre-views, side bar listings, overlay in-video ads and display ads.
- Share video on your web site, blog and other social channels, paying close attention to the optimal lengths per channel. Videos will have higher reach if uploaded directly to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. However, LinkedIn and Pinterest both allow you to share YouTube links and still feature them prominently.
To dig deeper into these areas, take a look at the slides we co-presented at the PR News digital conference last month, “Become a YouTube Distribution Star for Your Organization.”
