How to control what gets seen and
start a better conversation

Brands love YouTube, because it gives them a free way to show videos to existing users and a route for new users to discover their content.

Embedding YouTube videos on your website gives a leg up on the organic views (the YouTube algorithm likes distributed content) and some social proof (view count reassures customers).

You’ll want to use YouTube on your websites. But you could get so much more out of it.

It’s a bit bewildering to me that massive brands, who spend millions on gorgeous trailers and rich content, miss out the biggest tricks around YouTube. These tricks must be secrets… because so few organisations act on them.

 

1. Stop YouTube showing crap to your viewers

The default settings for YouTube embedding mean that related content from other producers is shown on your sites when the video finishes. They could be from competitors, trolls or worse (on YouTube there is always worse).

A classic YouTube embed looks like this. A bit of code to paste into your web page.

https://youtu.be/oJi75G5F1jA

After a successful viewing this code will go hog wild pulling all sorts of nonsense into your site.

Want the video to stop and show no more stuff? Just add this after the embed code.

?rel=0

So. The URL looks like this

https://youtu.be/oJi75G5F1jA?rel=0

That is the most common fix for the problem. But there’s an ever better way…

 

2. Control what comes next

Want to show your own choice of related video? Go find your embed code and add it to the first one using the parameter

?playlist=

Let’s say you want to play this video next

https://youtu.be/Va18zoUHJUI

The embed code would look like this

https://youtu.be/oJi75G5F1jA?playlist=Va18zoUHJUI

You have the users attention why not give them more of your good stuff?

 

3. Control the click

Some brands don’t like hosting the video themselves, so send straight into YouTube.

Here’s a random example. This page here…

http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/

has a click to jump straight to the Venom trailer page. The click looks like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzxFdtWmjto

The YouTube page displays random related videos top right and offers up more random content after the video. Venom is already in a Sony playlist of trailers. You can add a list parameter to a click. Sony could use this link instead on the website and control the experience on YouTube. Like this…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzxFdtWmjto&list=PLYeOyMz9C9kYmnPHfw5-ItOxYBiMG4amq

Oh, and while they’re at it they could…

 

4. Control the conversation

When your user does reach YouTube, the trick is to get the conversation started in the best way you can.

It’s just a second’s work to pin a comment at the top of every comments thread. That way the first thing a viewer sees is your point of view, a related, clickable link and maybe even a conversation starter. So, the first comment isn’t a customer service moan.

 

5. Have a better Facebook plan

It’s 2018 and some people are still trying to embed YouTube videos on Facebook. You know Facebook really hates that? Users need to click away to YouTube to watch the video and anything that has folk leave Facebook’s semi-walled garden gets terrible organic reach. The only reason to ever embed a YouTube video in Facebook is if you have absolutely no other way to get the content… and don’t really care that almost nobody will see it. Much better to play nice and upload your assets to Facebook’s video player. Or even better create assets that look good playing on silent, with big text on screen. Like this one that Network N made. 571k views and counting

https://facebook.com/PCGamesNetwork/videos/1542704832504187/

6. And go all in on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a sensible implementation of YouTube embeds and isn’t too cruel on the reach. If your business is making videos to explain your product then you should be getting the most popular member of staff to share the video, and then get everyone else in the business to like and share the post. That way the post gets a bit of virality and feedback from your clients is grouped in one place. Oh, and bad news… all the cool URL parameter stuff from earlier is stripped out by LinkedIn.

 

That’s it.

Score your business. How many of these six steps do you act on? Let me know on LinkedIn how you did – with a mark out of six. Humblebrag – I checked our site PCGamesN.com and we score at very best 3/6. Sigh.

 

This post has been written by Network N CEO James Binns. Network N develops its own channels and produces high quality video work around games and movies for clients all over the world. Want to learn more? Ping [email protected]