Top YouTube Tips For SMEs!

Keeping visitors coming back to your website relies on sustaining genuine interest, relevance and value with your target audience. A multi-channel social media policy creates powerful linkbuilding strategies, not only for corporates and large companies, but can greatly benefit SMEs and compact organisations too.

YouTube’s free-to-use video model, with its readymade, mass market audience, can be a valuable tool any business can use to engage their audience. There are some very straightforward and cost effective actions, which your website design and online marketing team can take to get your videos quickly set up and start attracting traffic.

Here are the ‘dos and don’ts of using YouTube :

DOs

Customise Channel Branding : Online visibility, presence and, ultimately ranking depends on building brand identity. Always customise your messaging channels via company branding colours and styling. A channel setup allows the highlighting of just uploads, playlists, favourites or all and offers YouTube users the option to subscribe to your content via the click of one button and the option to search just your uploaded content.

Add Subtitles: Remember the all important requirement for statutory, universal website accessibility. Since March 2010, all hearing impaired YouTube users can now use auto-captioning, a simple process that uses voice recognition.

Remove Offensive Comments: It does require good judgment but do delete offensive or spammed comments, although negative or critical comments, especially relevant ones, should not be removed immediately. There are options to moderate comments before they go live and a simple statement can be posted stating that such comments will not be tolerated. Individual persistent abuse or spam can also be blocked.

Organize Content: Content should be viewer-friendly rather than just a non stop stream of video uploads. Create playlists to group relevant videos together, and archive older content. Plan carefully and ensure to optimise titles and description as YouTube offers users the option to embed entire playlists (in addition to individual videos) into external sites.

Promote YouTube Videos Elsewhere: Here’s where social media messaging is required to draw attention every time you post a relevant video by writing content such as Blogs or articles. Twitterfeeds or adding to Facebook can be carried out through YouTube’s account settings, if you’ve linked up the services that automatically publishes news of a new video. Also, embed the relevant video in a blog post and at other sites too.

DON’Ts

Don’t Overuse Annotations: Adding comments that display over the top of video footage is a recent upgrade from YouTube. However, annotations look unprofessional, are a distraction to viewers and when overused, an annoyance. Your video content and other added info should be strong enough to draw attention and make an immediate impression.

Don’t Overlook Tags: YouTube’s content, as on many other sites, is organised by tag words. As with all SEO marketing principles, ensure you add the correct tags to your videos to correspond to niche word search terms. There is a limited choice of categories, so keep experimenting and checking for visitor traffic to different videos.

Don’t Neglect Your Channel: The No.1 online rule is if you want to succeed in the long term, then you must keep your content fresh and regularly updated to ensure search engines and human visitors, alike, keep subscribing. Remember, keep logging in as frequently as possible in the week to stay in touch and aware of current feedback, requests, and add favourites, etc, so you maintain close engagement with your target market audience.