Do's and Don'ts for YouTube Publishers
Here are some dos and don'ts for leveraging YouTube as a distribution platform.
YouTube Don’ts
So those are the do’s. Here are some don'ts with YouTube.
You don't want to set it and forget it. Make sure that your video is public and not private, that the videos you want your audience to see are optimized properly and working. It's a huge disappointment when you get a viewer to commit and watch your video and for one reason or another it won’t play. With thousands or millions of videos uploaded each hour and competing for your audience’s attention, for you to just set it and forget it is just not a good approach when it comes to YouTube.
Don't want to make it difficult for your target audience to figure out what your video is about. Optimize your thumbnails as discussed earlier. Particularly for viewers watching on smartphones, thumbnails that are abstract or don’t communicate the subject of your video will be especially hard to interpret and the chances are they're not going to click on it or watch it. Even if it’s something that might be useful or appealing to them, if they can’t tell what it is, they’ll never find out.
As many readers doubtless know, YouTube allows for clickable annotations called actions at the end of videos, and these can provide great call-to-action buttons. YouTube lets you add lots of them to you video, but when 5 or 6 buttons pop up at the end of of a video offering multiple options simultaneously, the call to action gets a little diluted. What is it that you actually want me to do? When I see all these different clickable buttons popping up, I don't know, and I may end up just walking away from that. Offer one call to action, and make it clear what you’re inviting viewers to do. Avoid making it difficult for your YouTube users.
To recap on YouTube: You want to make sure that you're being active, that you're optimizing your channel. You want to create a consistent publishing schedule, and you want to make sure you're linking to your other channels. What you don't want to do is set it and forget it, and you don't want to make it difficult for your audience.
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