YouTube is a great way to get your message out. The most viewed YouTube video ever, “evolution of dance”, was viewed more than 53 million times. “Vote Different”, an Obama ad, was seen by three and a half million people. Those are amazing numbers - many organizations would be happy with even a fraction of those views for their own videos.

Unfortunately, without a well planned and properly executed promotion plan, even a great video won’t have a real chance of attracting more than a few thousand viewers. You have to find a way to make your video stand out from the millions of videos available on YouTube and the tens of thousands of new videos that are uploaded daily.

Here are ten tips we’ve gathered here at Collactive, to help you promote your next YouTube video:

1. Create a Relevant, Informative Video – Even the best promotion strategy will fail if your video is not attractive. Your video should be as interesting and informative as possible. It should provide a fresh insight and be tied to current events.
2. Keep the Video Short – Try to keep your video under five minutes and preferably under two minutes long. Don’t lose the short attention span of today’s viewers, and you’ll have a higher chance of seeing your video blogged about.
3. Select a Catchy Title and Thumbnail - Most video lists in YouTube show twenty videos in a single page. The things a casual user will notice first are the video thumbnails and titles. Attract the user’s eye with a catchy title and an interesting thumbnail. Currently, the thumbnail YouTube uses is a single frame taken from the exact middle of your video. Turn this “center frame” into a powerful video invitation!
4. Embed Wisely - Embedding a video in your site is an efficient way to turn your readers into viewers, but it will require a visitor to explicitly click the “play” button for it to be counted as a view. You should either make the embedded video auto-play or link to the video page on YouTube directly.
5. Promote “Fresh” Videos - Focus your promotion efforts into the first 48 hours after your video is uploaded to YouTube. Only videos that were posted in the last 48 hours appear in the “most viewed today” list, the list that is most visited by YouTube viewers.
6. Choose Your Video Category Wisely - You will need at least 5,000 to 10,000 views to appear in the day’s 100 most viewed videos in any given category - a crucial milestone in promoting your video. With 10,000 views in the first 48 hours you will be the #1 most viewed video on the Auto & Vehicles category while with the same number of viewers you won’t even make the first 20 on today’s most viewed entertainment videos. The more such “honors” (top lists you appear in), the better the chance that your video will reach fame. If you don’t get on any top list within 48 hours, your video will probably never rise from obscurity.
7. Target the “Most Viewed” Lists - As most people in your community are yet to have a YouTube account, without simplifying their registration to YouTube it’s unlikely that many of them will register to rank, discuss or add the video to their favorites list. Therefore, chances are that you’ll not get many views from the important “Top Rated”, “Most Discussed” or “Top Favorites” lists.
8. Ask Your Community to View Your Video - Your community is a key resource, and you should use its power to kick-start your view’s popularity. You’ll need to bring in thousands of views by yourself to have a solid chance of getting your video picked up by the YouTube community on its way to becoming popular. According to our experience at Collactive, you can expect 3% to 5% of your mailing list to watch your video during the first 48 hours.
9. Ask Your Community to Promote Your Video - Asking your community members to pass the video to their friends is a simple and effective approach to gain more views. They can do it over email, share on Facebook, send MySpace bulletins and more. You should provide easy sharing functions for them and not rely solely on YouTube’s sharing features.
10. Ask Your Community to Promote Your Video on Social Media Sites – Getting your community to promote your video on social media sites, such as Propeller, Digg and reddit is a great way to spread the word about it. Reaching the front page of a social media site will bring thousands of views within those critical 48 hours.

If you’ve executed your promotion strategy well, your video should have received a few tens of thousands of views during the first 48 hours. From then on, your video will be picked up by the YouTube community itself, popping up in Most Popular pages, relevant search results, related videos and so on. Some of our customers’ videos accumulated as much as a million views within several months - without any further promotional efforts!

All the best with your next YouTube campaigns.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.