By Lydia Barley
YouTube, known as the place to go for hours of endless entertainment, whether that come from cute cat videos, funny fail videos, talented musician performance videos or video tutorials. But YouTube has actually become much more than that, it’s become a place for education and has built an online community of over a billion users. Most importantly however, YouTube has become a dynamic social media marketing tool for you and your business. YouTube is hugely popular, pulling in 1.8 billion users every month, making it no surprise that business are looking into uploading on YouTube, if they aren’t already.
Huge businesses are already uploading to YouTube including cosmetic retailer giant Lush. On it’s channel Lush brings in users with ‘how to’ videos that share how to use their products, ‘#LushLabs’ videos which show the bath art that comes from their products and ‘how it’s made’ videos which share how their products are made, alongside many others.
Uploading to YouTube can seem extremely daunting, especially if your business doesn’t already make videos. However, no matter how daunting it seems, uploading to YouTube is fairly simple. In this blog we will discuss uploading to YouTube so that you’re one step closer to becoming a YouTube pro.
Where to Start?
First you need to create your video. We won’t delve too deep into the type of content you should create as this depends on the industry that your business is in and your own personal branding. However we will share a few tips to help you:
- Be yourself (Your video will come across as more genuine and natural).
- Ensure that the video you are creating reflects your branding and how you want your brand to be perceived.
- Think of your settings. If you’re selling luxury cars we wouldn’t recommend using your laptop to create a video in your bedroom and similarly if you’re promoting a charity we wouldn’t recommend setting up a camera in your luxury car to create a video. The quality of your video and your video surroundings should reflect your brand.
- Make it unique and interesting. It’s great to have a catchy title that people want to click but if your video is boring you’ll have a very low watch rate (and your brand reputation may take a hit!).
Set up an account
Now this one is pretty obvious. To upload your video to YouTube you need to actually have a YouTube account. For more information on how to create a new channel checkout Create a New Channel – YouTube help.
Let’s get uploading
Now that you have an account and you have your video ready, it’s time to start uploading. In the top right-hand corner is a little video icon with a plus on it. Click on this icon and you will have the option to upload a video. Click on ‘upload video’.
You will then be transferred to another page where you can select the video file you want to upload.
Once you have selected the video. It will begin uploading and you can begin entering the details for the video. Overwhelmed by all the details you have to enter? Don’t worry we break down what each of them mean and how you should fill them out.
Title – The title is the title of your video. Similar to a title tag for search engines you want your YouTube video to contain your targeted keyword. This will assist in your video ranking highly in YouTube for that targeted keyword. Again, similarly to a title tag you want the title to be clickable. Make the title something interesting to grab attention and make users want to click – however don’t make it ‘clickbait’ make sure your title accurately reflects your video.
Description – Similar to a meta description viewers will be shown a snippet of your description in the search results so make it attention grabbing and interesting. Your description should include a brief summary of what viewers can expect to see in your video. In the description you can also include any relevant links (such as a link to a specific product that you discussed in the video).
Tags – Tags are similar to the keyword tag however in contrast to the keyword tag for search engines the tags on YouTube do affect your ranking in the YouTube search results. The tags you give provide information to YouTube on what your video is about. Make these keywords that you want to rank for and that are relevant to the video. You do not have a limit on the number of tags however the maximum characters per tag is 30 and the text field maximum is 500 characters.
Video Thumbnails – YouTube will auto generate thumbnails, but often these are very unflattering! You can upload your own custom thumbnail to use however. Take the time to create your own custom thumbnail that is attractive and catches the attention of viewers. You can easily create your own thumbnail with Canva.
Playlist – You can put your video into a playlist if you wish. A playlist is a group of videos that play one after another. Playlists are great to set up when you have a collection of different videos, you could make a playlist for ‘how to’ videos and a separate playlist for ‘business event’ videos.
Visibility – You can set the visibility of your video to public, unlisted, private or scheduled. If you select public your video will be accessible by anyone. If you select unlisted your video can be viewed by anyone who has a link to your video, but others cannot discover the video. Private videos are hidden and are only seen by users you allow to see it. Scheduled videos are uploaded to your channel but are not public until the time you chose. For maximum reach we recommend setting your video to public, how else are you going to draw new people in to your business.
Publish – Ta da!
Select publish then ta da, your video is up. While the process of uploading a video may seem foreign and daunting, that’s all there is to it. Now just sit back and relax, well, not quite. Make sure to regularly monitor the video, checking out how many views it has and how viewers are responding to the video. Take the time to respond to comments and engage with your audience, this will allow you to build a relationship with your audience, increasing engagement and following. You can also push your YouTube video on your website and on your social media channels, promoting your video across these channels will increase your reach.
