YouTube Best Practices: A guide

Publish YouTube content consistently

When building a successful YouTube channel, consistency is key. You need to create content on a regular basis, not whenever the mood strikes you. Also, you should aim to post your videos on the same day, so people will know when to expect new content. Some of the biggest media brands publish 500 videos a month. While you may not be able to reach this number when starting out, make sure you pick a realistic schedule and stick to it.

Post during peak times

Like on every other social media platform, you should upload content at the right time for the most engagement and click-throughs. The best time to post is on a Monday, Tuesday Wednesday between 2pm and 4pm, and Thursday and Friday, between noon and 3pm. This gives YouTube enough time to index your video, so it starts showing up in search results and in subscriber’s feeds.

Linking up social channels

This one’s pretty self-explanatory. To maximise the reach of your videos, make sure to hook up all your social channels to your YouTube page (and vice-versa). You can even go a step further by setting up automatic posts every time you upload a new video.

 

Customise Channel Layout

This is vital, especially if you are running a successful YouTube channel or a brand channel. Customising your YouTube channel layout allows you to add a trailer video that can give new audiences a run-through of what your channel’s about, what kind of content you make, what your brand specialises in, etc. Likewise, you can include specific sections that only show videos that belong to certain playlists (a great way of organising your videos if you upload regularly).

Communicate with your audience

You should take advantage of the fact that YouTube is a very easy platform to engage with people. Always communicate with your audience via comments, discussions and live streams. Building a loyal audience who care about your content is key to your brand’s long-term success on YouTube.

Channel Keywords

This is a must for any brand YouTube channels. They play a key role in YouTube’s overall algorithm for showing your videos to the right people, under the right searches and in the correct relevant video lists. You can access your channels keywords in your advanced settings, here.

Optimise your videos for accessibility

Make sure your videos are easy to find from both the YouTube and Google search engines. Also, you should produce content that’s shareable and provides a lot of value. Don’t overlook YouTube’s Best Practices for Metadata. YouTube medatda is information about your video, such as title tags, description and video title. With mobile taking over, it’s essential you create videos with mobile users in mind.

Subtitles!

Adding closed captions or subtitles increase the chances of video content appearing higher in organic search listings for the relevant topic. The automatic caption recognition software used by Google to add this automatically is extremely poor and does not get indexed by Google currently. Adding subtitles is easy, all you need to do is go to creator studio in YouTube and click on video manager to see all the videos uploaded to that channel. You can then click on edit and the caption tab at the top of the video editor screen. Captioned videos will have a ‘CC’ block next to the video title in video manager. You can also translate content into different languages, which will inevitable increase the chances of your content appearing in that country for relevant terms.

Hooking up Google Analytics  

Use Google Analytics? Well, you can track a YouTube page just like any other web page. Why? Connecting Analytics allows you access to a rich supply of data from your channel that can be extremely useful. Let’s take an Video Engagement report: You can crunch the numbers of watch time, average view duration, views, likes, comments, subscribers and revenue (the chosen few). It can also provide individual reports on different criteria, so for example, subscribers over time.

… and AdWords

When you link your YouTube channel to an AdWords account, you open up a new world of viewing data, remarketing functionality and engagement statistics. In addition to this, you can create and manage call-to-action overlay ads (CTA). If you log-on to your YouTube and click: Creator Studio -> Video Manager -> Channel -> Advanced -> Link an AdWords account. Once in place, you can put a small budget behind each piece of video content and target the most relevant audience to build the views, (which should help you increase your views and rankings in organic search for the content).

By following these quick tips, creating a successful YouTube channel should not be a problem! Always focus on consistency, high quality content relevant to your niche, and making your videos as valuable as possible.