We are creating videos all over the place. How can they benefit you most?

How you would present a video on Facebook is different than how you would present it on Facebook… create for the platform. When does it make sense to repurpose it and use it elsewhere? Well, that depends…

YouTube is a different environment than Facebook Live. With Facebook and Facebook Live, the Live is never as fun on playback and that’s the one big thing to keep in mind. Talking to comments is going to drag on and not be a fun experience for anyone on YouTube to watch back. This is the concern with repurposing.

Let’s say you compose a video using your camera, something that is designed to be non-live and it’s 30 seconds, you can put it on Instagram, FB and YouTube. If you are comparing Facebook and YouTube, the upload experience is the same, but on YouTube when someone is watching a video, it’s an intention push play. Whereas on Facebook and Instagram, these two platforms are just putting video in your face, and scrolling through your feed you just see it. You may or may not hit play or turn on the audio to see or hear what is going on. If it’s not visually compelling, no one is going to turn on the audio. It’s a different thought process someone will go through. My videos look just like a talking head… psychologically saying hear me.

No matter what you do, you are investing in your archives for the number 2 search engine on the planet. A video can perform for you not today, but in the future. That may not be the impact you want, it just depends on the goal.

Although we don’t know exactly how the YouTube algorithm works, what can be done to rank high in the YouTube search engine?

Well, they want to see channels that have high minutes watched and high engagement. It’s all about the report of your channel. Retention of individual videos is a small factor, very small, but can become a factor if it becomes a trend with your channel. We use some specific techniques…

Keywords are critical. You need to have these nailed down. You are going to want that as early on in the headline as possible. Keep the headline to 5 or 6 words if possible. Let them know why they should care in the headline.

The description is really special. In a direct Google search to a YouTube video, the first couple lines of the description play a role. YouTube will weight the entire description for their search results; Google is only concerned about the first couple of lines.

I’ve often been asked if it’s true that YouTube is listening to the words in the video to help them decide on indexing. From what I have seen, there’s not a lot of evidence to this. It’s possible, but not reliable. So, does the length of the video have anything to do with it showing up in search? Yes, it does. Look at timestamps and length of video. Take data from what is already there. This is human SEO. Look at if people are watching the long one or the short one and follow that lead. If your audience sees a video with someone they don’t know specifically, they will choose the shorter one every time.

Tags are important. That’s how you bring it all in. Tags are more of an opportunity to cover your bases. Thinking in layman’s terms, put in your tags. Need help with what tags you should use? Try the Google Chrome extension VidIQ. It adds functionality to your browser and will pull out tags on any video page. Another thing to think about is to use Keyword Planner from Google Adwords. Look to see how high the competition is for the keywords you are thinking. Also, just start typing in what you think anyone else would to find your video. When you start typing in the words, the predictive function will appear below it. What is highly searched for will be suggested to you. Bammmm, there are your tags!

The thumbnail is where it’s at. If you do not have custom thumbnails you are missing out. Use thumbnails with overlaid text on an image. Major important, the thumbnail.

Last bit of info: did you know that 80% of YouTube viewers are outside of the United States… yep.