YouTube remains one of the most powerful social media platforms for professionals looking to promote their businesses for multiple reasons. Its popularity is only the tip of the iceberg – there’s much more to the platform beneath that people often tend to overlook. If you’re looking for a way to increase the exposure of your business and expand into some new markets easily, YouTube should be one of your top choices.
As with every social media platform, it can take some time to get used to how things work and fine-tune your content to have the right tone. But once you’re there, you’ll find the momentum very easy to maintain, especially if you use the tools provided to you by the platform to their full potential.
Pick a Format
One of the most important decisions you’ll need to make is about the format of your videos. Whatever you pick, you need to be consistent about it and use it properly in all your videos. The “talking head” format is a very popular one for many business-oriented channels. If you’re doing product reviews, you can get away without having to show your face, or much else other than your hands. Some creators also explore alternative approaches like 3D avatars, although those can come with an increased production cost.
Have a Consistent Schedule
Your schedule is also going to be an important factor in your long-term success. Many people treat YouTube as an indirect replacement of television. To that end, users often like it when a channel has a consistent, predictable schedule that they can plan around. You probably enjoy the idea of waiting for a new video by your favorite channel to come out, too. Use that to your advantage and make sure that you deviate from your schedule as little as possible.
Brush Up on Your Video Editing Skills
You don’t have to be a world-class video producer to stand out in the YouTube community, but taking some time to work on your skills in this area can still be very worthwhile. There are some common techniques that you can learn, which will immediately improve the overall production quality of your videos. Play with your lighting, experiment with different cutting techniques, and most importantly, listen to the feedback of your viewers. If there’s anything wrong with the way you’re editing your videos, you can be sure that people will be racing to point it out in most cases.
Thumbnails Matter a Lot
It might seem like a small detail compared to the actual video itself, but sometimes the thumbnail can make all the difference between someone watching your video or skipping it. This is especially true today when people’s attention spans keep getting shorter and shorter. You have to do your best to grab people’s attention with that tiny picture, or you’ll be missing out on a lot of potential viewers. Some video producers spend a lot of time polishing their thumbnails for this precise reason, even though the final video looks nothing like that tiny preview.
Use Calls to Action Liberally
In a typical video, you have lots of opportunities to insert calls to action – and you should take full advantage of them. Remind people to like and subscribe to your video and explain how the rest of your channel can benefit them. Ask questions and prompt people to respond in the comments below. There are many ways to engage your viewers and promote action on their part that is not immediately obvious until you’ve been involved with the network for a while. There’s a reason you see all those famous content creators repeating those phrases all the time, even though they sound canned at this point – they simply work.
External Promotion – Yes or No?
Getting your videos promoted by external means can be a tricky ordeal, depending on the methods you choose. Generally speaking, it’s not a bad idea if you have good prospects for your channel’s popularity as a whole. But promoting videos that won’t bring in too many extra subscribers is only going to be a waste of money which could be utilized better in other ways. Sometimes, you might get the rare opportunity to promote a video for free, which is another story and is something you should definitely take advantage of.
Use the Description Box Fully
The description box is another detail that beginner creators tend to overlook. That’s a pretty bad mistake though, all things considered. You have a lot of room to type a detailed description of your video or enter anything else related to it at all. Don’t just drop a few brief words and call it a day. Getting people to expand that box is even better because it can subconsciously lead to further interaction with your channel. Take a look at a video published by any big YouTuber – chances are you’re going to see multiple lines in the description box, sometimes even full paragraphs. Follow that trend and you’ll see good results.
Engage the Community
Don’t forget that YouTube is a community first and foremost. People interact in a specific way, and they have certain expectations about your tone and style. And while finding your own unique style is important, you should do your best to adapt your work to the way the community as a whole operates. Try to engage others as well – watch their videos, comment on them, subscribe to their channels, and so on. Just make sure that you do it in an organic way, instead of doing silly things like commenting “subscribe for subscribe”. This is a fast way to ruin the reputation of any professional YouTube channel.
Remember that YouTube keeps evolving as well. The people behind it are hard at work developing new algorithms for promoting and suggesting videos, and you will have to adapt to those changes whether you like them or not. In some cases, one small change can have a big impact on your channel, so you should pay attention to upcoming developments on the platform and engage YouTube themselves in active communication whenever you have the opportunity.
