In part I of this story in our Oct. 17 edition we looked at how brands can strengthen their YouTube content without spending too much money. This week we’ll explore several best practices for measuring your YouTube efforts.
Need an incentive to make sure your brand is engaged with YouTube? How’s the fact that 88% of all video searches result in a YouTube video? Or that after behemoth Google, YouTube is the largest search engine?
Short n’ Sweet: For Ian Beckman, video producer, W2O Group, SEO, while critical, needsnot be time consuming. In fact, it’s the opposite: keep titles and descriptions for your YouTube videos “short and sweet…a 3-sentence description is ideal,” he says, adding that using keywords as you write descriptors is recommended. “Use as many as you can,” he urges. Yet avoid “filling the screen with text.” As noted in part I of this series, YouTube’s Creator Playbook has excellent guidelines in this regard, Beckman says.
Rose Mary Moegling, manager, customer engagement, Toshiba America Medical Systems, avoids breaking out measurement on its own. Assembling a video “is a package,” she says, which includes footage, sound, music, calls to action (CTA) and measurement. That said, she urges communicators to avoid “being dishonest with keywords...don’t hype your video with the latest hot word and then barely mention it in the video.” To find keywords she recommends Keyword Tool.
The Metrics: All of those featured in this article concurred that agreeing on measurable goals for your YouTube video efforts from the outset is perhaps the most important step to take regarding measurement. “Benchmark before you begin,” Moegling adds. Having done that, you can decide the metric or metrics you will emphasize.
For Clay Helm, PR director at Autodesk, the number of people sharing and commenting on your video are more important metrics than views. Shares and comments, she says, indicate engagement with your video. Likewise, Helm takes this line of reasoning when she’s thinking about the mix of influencers Autodesk hires. In fact, before deciding on an influencer, she puts a lot of weight into the amount and type of comments the influencer has received. “That will tell you a lot about engagement,” she says.
Thumbing Through: Although thumbnails—the photo that is the first thing a viewer sees at the start of a YouTube video—aren’t strictly SEO, they’re critical to search in that they can draw viewers to your video or lose them. “You don’t want to post YouTube content without a representative thumbnail…and you don’t want a thumbnail [to appear] by default, ” W2O’s Beckman says. On the other hand, thumbnails that are confusing or inaccurately represent the subject matter of your video ultimately may reduce views and raise ire against your brand. Make sure the thumbnail is “an engaging, representative shot that’s the essence of your story.” One tool he recommends to create thumbnails is Adobe’s Painter in Lightroom.
Moegling,
Manager,
Customer Engagement, Toshiba America Medical Systems
Annotations and Analytics: There are several schools of thought regarding the use of annotations. Some communicators use them as little as possible, others believe they’re essential navigational tools and will keep viewers watching.
Regardless of your view on annotations, Beckman urges communicators to use YouTube’s analytics tab to see which of your annotations are doing well and try to analyze why those have been successful.
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