By Heather Nguyen, Media Content Specialist
Including video content in your marketing strategy not only increases brand recognition, but it also helps generate more leads, sales, and engagement (Wyzowl).
With YouTube being the most popular video-sharing platform (Kinsta), it is an important channel for brands to leverage. However, in order to increase the visibility of your content, it is important to understand the algorithm.
Here are five best practices to strengthen your brand’s presence in the YouTube algorithm.
1) Keywords
Knowing what keywords to use in the titles, descriptions, and tags of your videos will help them appear in search results and attract a larger audience (Hootsuite).
Using Google Trends is an easy way to see what topics are popular at a given time. You can enter the general topic of a video you are planning to post and not only see if it’s currently a topic of interest, but also what time of the year it’s searched the most. You can also compare two different terms and see which one is more searchable. This can help with deciding the topics and titles of your videos, as well as planning when to post them.
TubeBuddy, a free browser extension, is another way to see what keywords are most searchable. It has a keyword explorer function that can be used when editing the tags of your video before posting. It ranks the words you add, indicating what words are highly searchable.
Paying close attention to the keywords you use will greatly help the visibility of your videos.
2) Watch Time and Engagement
The watch time and engagement on your videos is important for the YouTube algorithm. The higher your watch time and engagement, the more likely your videos will appear in users’ recommended section (Hootsuite).
The watch time is the average amount of time viewers watch a specific video, and this can be found in your YouTube analytics within the creator studio. When it comes to creating the content for your channel, focus on keeping your videos engaging so that viewers are more likely to watch it in its entirety. Also, pay attention to which of your videos have the highest watch times. This may help you better understand what type of content is best for your particular audience.
When viewers interact with your videos by liking and commenting, this engagement will help boost your videos’ visibility. Reminding your audience to like, comment, and subscribe at the end of videos can help, but it is also important for you to engage back with your audience. Replying to and hearting their comments is a good way to do this.
3) Consistent Posting Schedule
Having a consistent posting schedule is another major factor in increasing the visibility of your videos. Posting weekly on the same day and time is ideal. If you’re able to make videos in advance, you can upload them and schedule when you want them to go live publicly.
4) Appealing Channel Elements
Having appealing video thumbnails, a channel trailer, and an organized channel layout will encourage viewers to look at your channel and subscribe (Portent).
The thumbnails of your videos are viewers’ first impression of your content. If the thumbnail catches their attention, they are more likely to click on the video. Also, making sure all of your thumbnails look cohesive with your brand is important in making your channel look organized and professional.
When organizing your channel layout, you have the option of adding a channel trailer, which is the video that will appear at the top of the home page of your channel. Having a video that represents your entire brand in this spot is a great way to introduce yourself to viewers visiting your channel for the first time.
Having an overall appealing channel layout that is in alignment with your brand will help create interest within the viewers. Having a custom profile picture and header, as well as organized playlists will be pleasing to the eye and cause viewers to want to look through your content.
5) Create Playlists
Creating playlists of the different subgroups of videos you have on your channel is a good way to create organization, as well as helping viewers find more of the content they like seeing. Having playlists can also help increase the watch time of your videos, as viewers are likely to watch more of your videos if they automatically play after each other (Hootsuite).
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References:
- https://www.wyzowl.com/video-marketing-statistics/
- https://kinsta.com/blog/video-hosting/#1-youtube
- https://trends.google.com/trends/
- https://www.tubebuddy.com/
- https://www.portent.com/blog/social-media/youtube-best-practices-five-things-you-can-do-today.htm
- https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-the-youtube-algorithm-works/
