5 YouTube Best Practices for Improved Results

Improve the results you drive from your videos by adopting these YouTube best practices right away!

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, right after its parent, Google (obviously). Nearly a fifth of all online traffic finds itself on the video search engine, which means that for as valuable as video content is, it can be hard for your audience to find it.

The YouTube best practices outlined here can help you drive better results in a shorter timeframe from your video content on YouTube.

Standardize Your Content

When you’re driving down the street and you see those big, golden arches peaking through a sea of billboards and highrises, you know that you aren’t too far from a McDonald’s. Your videos should be equally recognizable.

Now, this is not to say that you need to have an instantaneously recognizable brand, but your video content should be properly branded and that branding should be consistent. Whether it’s something like an intro, music, or a style of video, people should be able to identify that they are watching one of your videos from the get go.

Create Playlists

Playlists are great tools for organizing your YouTube channel, and they are just another way to categorize and tag your videos, which is hugely beneficial for search.

Again, with so much content being shared on the video engine every second, the more you can do to walk people through what they are seeing and what value the content will bring to them, the better chance you’ll have of getting your videos seen and retaining your audience for a longer watch time.

Commit to Consistency

If you’re going to share a video today, then another one tomorrow, then a third in two months, another a week after that and so on without a clearly consistent production and publishing schedule, it will be hard to build a loyal following, and your YouTube channel will never really get to where you want it to go.

You don’t necessarily need to be creating dozens of videos every month, but you should be at least somewhat consistent in the frequency with which you’re publishing videos. That is especially true if you’re creating videos as part of a series, where your subscribers and series followers are expecting new content every so often.

Properly Tag Your Videos

With options to improve search potential so easily accessible, it’s surprising that there are still marketers who do not take advantage of these elements.

When you have completed a video and are ready to upload it, add in specific tags (it helps if there are some auto-populated based on existing categories) and take advantage of the descriptions, geo-tagging, subtitles (when applicable, or auto-populated), video elements, etc. Every option should be used when it applies, as each of these are categorization and classification elements (just like the playlists discussed above) and can help improve your videos discoverability.

Keep Your Videos Short and Focused

Ideally, your videos are going to be under two minutes in length. The reason is simple: data shows that the average online attention span is roughly 8.25 seconds. So, even your most engaged audience might not be willing to give you more than a couple of minutes of their time. You’ll need to create content that is almost immediately captivating and brief enough that people will stick around until the very end.

The easiest way to go about this is to keep your videos relatively straightforward. You’re not hosting an hour long talk show; this is a small bit of easily digested content that engages your audience and provides value. There is no easier way to do this than to ask a question and use your minute or two to answer it. Pay attention to your analytics, as those will give you an idea of your audience retention, and in turn provide insight into how long your videos should be.

Conclusion

Of course, every marketer and brand will have different uses for a network like YouTube. But, in order to find success with the network, you’ll need to know about some of the best practices, and these five are a good start.