Youtube Descriptions, Title, Tags & Thumbnails Best Practices

How you setup your video on YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn is critical to its success. Building on the first video in the series, we're going to take a look at best practices in terms of titles, thumbnails, descriptions and tags. Be sure to check out speechpad.com, the service we use for SRT captions. Transcript below:

Transcript

In this video, we're going to take a look at how to set up your video for success on Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Let's take a look. Hey, marketers, Nelson from Skylight Productions here. Like I said in the first video, I wanted to take this time to do a short video series to help you take a look at your existing video assets and see if they're performing in the way that they should be. We want to make sure you're getting a good return on your investment for your video production. In the previous video, we talked a bit about keywords and how to find out what your keywords should be for your video SEO. There's some tools in there, some tricks, some tips. But what we're going to do is take those keywords now and use them to set up your video on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn. So, first of all, the title. So many times people post their videos and they just put in whatever title comes to their mind. This is not the best strategy. We need to use those keywords because number one, all these platforms are going to use that title for search. And so, if people are looking for a particular product, a particular industry, a particular how-to, you can use those keywords in the title of your video and that's going to bump you up in that search ranking. But the other side to it is we want to make sure that that title is friendly and attractive to people so that they actually click on it when they do pop up in those searches. So, it takes a little bit of thinking to think about how do I get these keywords in here, but make it feel organic and make it feel like this is something people actually want to click on and watch and it's going to be useful for them. So, the next thing we want to talk about is the video description. Again, we're going to put those keywords into video description. There's a lot more room here. What I usually suggest for people is let's make sure that we're putting a website, a call to action, your key messaging, right on those top couple of lines, no matter what platform you're on, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, wherever. Because those are going to be the things that people see as they click on the video and oftentimes they have to scroll down or they have to click to reveal the rest of that text. So, make sure that that's very well established, make sure you have lots of texts in there, lots of explanation of what's in the video, what's in the product. You can have links, you can have all sorts of things in there, but the most important information really needs to go at the top. The description really is often neglected. And again, we're giving as much data as possible to all of the search engines and all of the social platforms to grab and know what's in your video. One of the most important things on any video platform is the tags. And so many times I see these neglected. People, maybe pop in three or four of the things that kind of come to their mind, but these are critical in people finding your content. On YouTube, not only does it help with the search ranking, but it also helps with suggested videos. So, you want to be that video that pops up after someone watches someone else's video and they'll click on yours. This is a great way for you to build your audience of people who are already on looking at other videos if you're the suggested video after they've watched something else. So, we need to really be thinking through not only your product or your brand, but also be thinking about other products and other brands and things that might connect people to that video so they jump on and watch and engage with your brand from there. The tags really are important. Use every single character that you have available in those tags. Get creative. Think outside the box. Your audience doesn't see these tags and these are the kinds of things that we're going to be looking at and testing and we can always change them later. So, try things, some of them will work, some of them won't work, but we're going to figure that out as we go along. I would venture to say the most important thing in setting up your video, no matter what platform is the thumbnail. It is the first thing people see when your video pops up, it's either going to grab them and they're going to click or they're going to keep on scrolling. And again, similar to the tags, this is something that you can change. You can try different things, see what works and you get a sense of what your audience likes to see in their thumbnails. So, don't just pick the standard YouTube or Facebook thumbnail. Don't let them pick it for you. Go ahead and get in there and set something up with some nice blocky text that explains what's in the video. A nice image, a nice grab from the frame, and that's going to be something that's going to grab people's attention. If you have graphic design help, graphic designers are great at that. If you don't, then you can always use a service like Canva, which does have templates set up for YouTube thumbnails and you can get some great-looking, on-brand thumbnails that way. Another great thing to do would be to add captions to your video. Not only is this great for search because it gives all those platforms an idea of what's inside your video, it also is great for accessibility. People who may be hearing impaired can watch a video. The other thing is that on pretty, well, every platform, what we're starting to see is that people are watching video silent. Whether you're on Instagram or Facebook or even YouTube, those videos will go through someone's feed and they might watch the first couple seconds and decide where they're going to click on it. And the only way to grab them when they're watching it with the sound off is with captions. So, there are some great services, you can get captions done really, really inexpensively. You want them in SRT format and every platform you can upload those along with your video and it will sync them up with the time and so they'll work great. We've used a service called Speechpad in the past, which is basically a dollar per minute of content, so it's not very much money if you have very short videos to get that SRT delivered, upload that right to your social platform or to YouTube, and you've got your captions built-in. Don't rely on the built-in transcription either, it's always terrible. So, those are the basics. Now, you can go ahead and publish that video on the platform if it isn't already published already and start getting that data coming in. If you have a video that's already published, go ahead and note the date when you made these changes or even the time and what you are going to see is those analytics and how they've changed from that point on. You can see the positive impact. I guarantee you just making some of these changes, you're going to already see a positive impact in viewership, in impressions and all of that stuff. So, go ahead and publish that video and let that data start coming in. And in the next video, we're going to take a look at what are some of those analytics we want to be paying attention to. Are views really that important? What are our impressions? So, tune in next time. We'll see you then.