Metrics/Tracking: How to measure effectiveness

Make sure to tweak the links put up on YouTube (whether in a YouTube channel or in a video description) by adding “?video=1” to the end of each URL. This makes it much easier to track inbound links using Google Analytics or another metrics tool.

TubeMogul and VidMetrix also track views/comments/ratings on each individual video and draw out nice graphs that can be shared with the team. Additionally, these tools follow the viral spread of a video outside of YouTube and throughout other social media sites and blogs.

Strategic Tagging

YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that our video is online, don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers to engage with all your content, rather than jumping away to “related” content that actually has nothing to do with your brand/startup.

So how do we strategically tag? Choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talking about obscure tags, but more unique tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

When views start trailing off after a few days to a week, it’s time to add some more generic tags, tags that draw out the long tail of a video as it starts to appear in search results on YouTube and Google.

Releasing all videos simultaneously

Once people are watching a video, how do you keep them engaged and bring them back to a website?

Most of the time bloggers/vloggers will say: “We’re going to release one every few days so that viewers look forward to each video.”

This is the wrong way to think about YouTube marketing. If you have multiple videos, you should post all of them at once. If someone sees the first video and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would they make them wait until we post the next one? You should give them everything up front. If a user wants to watch all five of our videos right now, there’s a much better chance that we’ll be able to persuade them to click through to our website. You don’t make them wait after seeing the first video, because they’re never going to see the next four.

Using this strategy, we give our most interested viewers the chance to fully engage with a campaign without compromising the opportunity to individually release and market each consecutive video.

Commenting: A conversation with yourself

Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. You get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section – especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.

Don’t be afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, you could just delete their comment. You can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.

A heated comment thread (done well) will engage viewers and will drive traffic back to our sites.

Thumbnail Optimization

If a video is sitting on the Most Viewed page with 19 other videos, a compelling video thumbnail is the single best strategy to maximize the number of clicks the video gets.

YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video. As you edit our videos, make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting. It’s no surprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds of thousands of views. Not to say that this is the best strategy, but you get the idea. Two rules of thumb: the thumbnail should be clear (suggesting high video quality) and ideally it should have a face or at least a person in it.

When you feel particularly creative, you optimize all three thumbnails then change the thumbnail every few hours. This is definitely an underused strategy, but it’s an interesting way to keep a video fresh once it’s on the Most Viewed list.