How to make the most of YouTube (Now with Video Tutorials!)

YouTube’s David Ripert, Joe Mc Demottroe and Bengu Atamer provided a number of helpful tips for content producers at MIPCOM, October 10.

Here are the key take-aways:

– Know what works. You can be relevant, surprising, helpful, or social — or any combination of the four. This point was illustrated with a number of videos, including Michelle Phan’s Lady Gaga Poker Face tutorial, for makeup aficionados.

– Build a consistent series. Be consistent in terms of timing, tone, and the host you bring in. Here’s one of YouTube’s own tutorials on this point:

– Tentpole your programming. Keep content fresh by building it around holidays or trending topics, but make sure to build your audience ahead of time, preparing them for what’s to come.

– Optimise for search. YouTube is the second-largest search engine, so make sure you fill out your titles, description and tag sections.

– Keep people engaged. Keep it short, hook them early, and remember that passion supercedes production values. In the first 15 seconds, people should immediately know what they’ve clicked on and what they’re about to watch.

– Keep their attention: minimal branding, basic structure, start with a bang.

– Collaborate! Remember, you’re not alone! One thing you can do is choose a host for your show who already has a strong YouTube following. Ask them to help curate your show.

– Multiply a video’s footprint: Think short chapters, stacked videos in the ‘subscribe’ feed, metadata for search, and several monetised videos instead of one.

The more content you have, the more “snackable” it is. And the more easily people will be able to discover it. Naturally, you can also monetise your more short-form content using pre-rolls (longer form content, on the other hand, is harder to monetise).

Visit YouTube to see more of the above best practice videos.