It is overwhelming to learn how the online world became more engaging and dynamic in the past several years.

A lot of video content were uploaded in the social media platforms and websites by personalities and influencers and had entertain millions of subscribers amidst health crisis and have helped many businesses and services survived the worldwide economic loss caused by the pandemic.

Interestingly, some videos by newly created accounts also trends online and it encouraged the creators in sharing more creative and shrewd content.

Video is one powerful tool in influencer marketing and a ton of great content are already on YouTube and other video sharing platforms like Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitch. This trend will burgeon in the next few years so creating stellar videos is crucial in the “battlefield.”

If you are also pursuing to influence through video platforms, you may want to explore Strategic Digital Marketing authors Eric Greenberg and Alexander Kates useful tips in building video channel strategy.

Remember the Basic

Greenberg and Kates believe in the effectiveness of optimizing metadata. This is the information that surrounds a video – title, tags, and description. Uploading a video in YouTube means indexing your video information for search, promotion, related videos and ad serving. Since YouTube is considered as the second largest search engine, take advantage of this by optimizing your video content.

The authors also suggested to use keyword-generating tools to help you find relevant and compelling keywords for metadata:

  1. YouTube Search Suggestions
  2. YouTube Keyword Suggestion Tool
  3. YouTube Trending Topics
  4. Google Trends

Custom Thumbnails as Mini Marketing Posters

Some video uploaders tend to forget the importance of thumbnails in sharing videos online. But Greenberg and Kates stressed that creating custom thumbnail along the video file to be uploaded is a must because it is like a mini marketing poster. The thumbnail should display what the video is about.

Appropriate thumbnails and metadata placements can drive significant traffic for your videos.

The Beauty of Annotations

Annotations are text overlays that you can place on videos uploaded on YouTube which serve numerous uses. Greenberg and Kates pointed out the need for video producers to consistently create new, creative and strategic ways to apply annotations on videos. It is also best to take the opportunity what YouTube offered to its good standing members a way to put links to their associated websites directly from annotations in their videos.

As Chris Atkinson of ReelSEO also shared “the opportunities presented by these annotations are huge, as your calls to action can lead viewers to your website, where you can sell your own stuff, offer exclusive content, and not be inhibited by the rules of YouTube.”

Captions for Broader Audiences

Videos uploaded online can reach different audiences anywhere in the world. Greenberg and Kates suggest for creators and producers to take extra steps to optimize content to reach broader viewers including foreign language speakers and those who are hard-of-hearing by providing own captions and transcriptions of audio in the video content. A transcript is a text version of the audio in the video that can be uploaded to YouTube and other video-sharing platforms along with the video file. This can be used to create captions for the current language of the video or to create subtitles in other languages.

Maintaining Channel Feed

The video channel’s activity summed up the channel feed and the main line of communication with the subscribers. This means, as Greenberg and Kates believe, that the channel feed should promote the content important to you, stay updated, and never overwhelm the subscribers with too much content. “You may not be able to upload on a weekly schedule but you can remain active by simply commenting, liking, playlisting, and favoriting videos from other channels and you can become a destination as a tastemaker for other great content.”  

Now, it’s your turn to boost your video channel into a more engaging and influencing one.