The following is a summary of Greg Jarboe‘s SES Chicago ’09 YouTube & Video Optimization session moderated by Anne Kennedy, Founding Partner & CMO of Joblr.com; Managing Partner & Founder of Beyond Ink.
Greg is President & Co-founder of SEO-PR.
We all know Google rules search. Interestingly enough however, there were 10 billion videos watched on YouTube in August while Google put 9 billion searches on the board. While neither number can be scoffed at, the comparison makes obvious why YouTube is arguably the most under-leveraged marketing vehicle your brand may have access to.
Youtube’s audience is more diverse than many marketers think. Although the audience does skew towards a younger group 30% of all viewers are 35 and older. YouTube show’s no sign of slowing down as it increasingly reaches for a more and more diverse crowd. Although it started with younger crowd it continues to expand, making for a wide array of users all looking to discover that video they just have to share with their friends and family.
How do you get people to discover, watch and share YouTube videos?
Greg will boil 9 steps down to the 3 most important steps for Youtube success. YouTube says it themselves, the platform is a place for users to “discover, watch and share” videos with others. If you’re video isn’t discovered by people nothing good happens. If people discover it and its corporate propaganda nothing good happens. On the other hand if people find it, like it and share it with friends, that’s when good things (viral) happen.
Step 1:
Discovery
How do people discover videos?
Tubemogul helps you syndicate your videos to several different video sites. They also do research, providing in-depth tracking statistics and anlaytics for online video!
If you look at the breakdown you’ll see that 45% of videos are discovered on video sites and only 6% with search engines. If you are putting all your time into optimizing for universal search, you’re only chasing 6%.
YouTube has a different algorithm than Google. Where as Google uses somewhere upwards 0f 200 factors to rank content, YouTube has somewhere around 1/10 working to rank videos. The algorithm is relatively immature at this point. Greg believes that optimizing video for YouTube and blogs are critical to the discovery process. A major piece to ranking is making sure you are optimizing the title, description and tags for YoutTube’s text matching system.
Help your videos be discovered in search results and related videos:
Title: 120 characters (right longer titles)
– think of your title as a headline
– if you include brand name in title, it should go last
description: 1,000 characters
– Be as detailed as possible ( short of entire transcript)
– Include URLs (with http://) to playlist or website
Tags: 120 characters
– be as detailed as possible
– include: brand, city, topics
Make sure all keywords in your tags are in your title and descriptions
Also important is the number of views the video is receiving as well as how many & highly the video has been rated.
How do you find what search terms people are searching for?
YouTube displays search term suggestions as you type your query into the search field. These suggestions are based on what others have been searching for recently.
YouTube keyword suggestion tool. This tool is a little less mature. I feel that to be an understatement 🙂
Step 2: Watch
Keepin’ it legit:Increasing video views without using “any automated system”
Links in video description
– Cross-promote to a playlist on your channel or your website
Video responses
– Point users to your next video with video responses
Annotations
– Link to another video
Captions
– Add subtitles to your video and reach a broader audience
Embedding
– Get additional views within the context of a relevant website (encourage blog owners to embed within blogs) some believe this is the secret sauce.
Compelling video content is the second most critical success factor on YouTube. Your content matters. If you optimize a piece of crap nobody will care, if you optimize something compelling, people will share (rhyme was unintentional, but catchy). People will generally decide within the first 10seconds of the video if its something worth sticking around for10% of people leave
50% people leave halfway through.
if your advertising. youtube doesn’t drop the layover ad until 10 sec in. you’ve already lost 10% of viewers.
Best video format for optimizing your video uploads
This seems too change rather frequently, so don’t live by this…forever.
– resolution: 1280×720 (16×9 HD)) and 640×480 (4:3SD)
There is said to be 10 kinds of TV commercials that change people’s brand preference. Some combinations of these categories proved better than others in changing consumer’s brand preference.
- Humor
- Slice of life
- Testimonials
- Demonstrations
- Problem solution
- Talking heads
- Characters
- Reason why
- News
- Emotion
Step 3: Share
Video must go viral to be successful
Opinion leaders play a critical role in deciding which videos go viral. It is sharing the sharing of content that is the multiplyer. When opinion leaders decide a video is good that’s about the time it goes viral. Try promoting your videos to opinion leaders of the youtube community and let these users know you’ve published a video you think they will be interested in.
Photo Credit Flickr/toprankonlinemarketing
