YouTube can be an extremely powerful tool in your marketing and communications toolbox, especially if video production is already built in to your content distribution process.

If you want to learn how to optimize your YouTube channel, check out the previous training and infosheet.

The impact of YouTube is great across the generational spectrum. According to the Pew Research Center, 81% of U.S. adults say they use YouTube, and upwards of 25% of adults indicate they consume news there as well.

For teens, 95% indicate they use YouTube, and about 20% of them visit YouTube ‘almost constantly’.

As the second-most visited website behind Google, people run to YouTube for everything from discovering “how tos” to utilizing the site for brand research. And with the Shorts feature gaining traction, YouTube is definitely keeping its top ranking for a long time to come.

Unlike other natively-provided social media analytics, YouTube provides a tremendous amount of data for users to analyze and update their strategy. You can view channel level data, but the individual video-level data is where you can discover what and why things are happening.

With so much data to look for, during this training we really focused on “how viewers find this video”, diving into the analytics around “YouTube search” and “Suggested videos”.

Both of these areas are easy to find, digest, and learn from in order to update everything from the title of your video, to the description and tags (keywords).

In this training we walk through how this can be done, and shared a unit’s real-world experience in what this looks like and the impact changes based off of the data can have on your YouTube channel.

And a reminder: a little TLC goes a long way.

·         Use YouTube search keywords to update video titles/descriptions.

·         Compare and contrast suggested videos to your own videos.

·         Ask yourself what additional content might emerge from this review?

·         REMINDER: social sharing of videos should still occur native to the platform.

·         Be sure to optimize your channel settings and individual videos.

 Presenter: Erin Knowles