You’ve spent critical resources (staff time and money) creating videos for what you hope will be a lively YouTube channel. You’ve uploaded a healthy number of engaging videos, and have even customized your YouTube theme. But there’s a problem.
After a few months, you still only have a couple of subscribers and not many views.
Check your titles and tags
One of the most common causes of low view numbers (besides boring content) is an incorrect use of titles and tags. You’ve busy (just like we all are) and quickly enter titles and tags (or not) as you upload. But there is a difference between “Billy Shore Speaking At Our Annual Conference” and “Can We End Childhood Hunger By 2015? Billy Shore Of Share Our Strength”.
Likes and Retweets
In an age of Facebook likes and tweets, titles are everything (FYI, we have left the age of sharing on Facebook). Titles are the the very heart of retweets, “likes” and click-thoughs. Before Facebook and Twitter, we shared everything by email. And more often than not, our friends actually read the body of the email – or at least the subheadings.
Not so much on Facebook and Twitter. Between streams of status updates and noise that’s becoming more and more like static, we have trained our focus on titles.
Homework: Go through your YouTube vidoes and edit the titles with these two tips in mind:
- Try using questions for titles. Questions psychologically beg for an answer. If we know the answer, we will click. If if we don’t know the answer, we will click.
- Bullet-point your titles. Watch your video and see if you can bullet point the content in the title. For example, a video of a nurse talking about dietary tips for cancer patients might contain a total of 5 dietary tips. The bullet-point title would be “5 dietary tips for early stage cancer patients”.
Google Is Still In The Royal Flush
Facebook has stollen the crown (should Mark get a @foursquare badge?), but Google is still in the royal family. If you’re like me, when you go to YouTube.com (directly, without clicking a link someone shared), it’s because you’re searching for something. Your constituants are doing the same.
When you upload your videos, think about how you would search for this video if you wanted to find it. Remember that people that don’t know about your organization yet won’t be searching for your events, jargon or acronyms (but do use these in your tags).
Last point here. Create a simple list of guidelines for staff on how to use titles and tags. Title it “5 ways to make your boss happy”. And send it out by email.
