Why and when do businesses look for ‘software development companies near me’?

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An often underused, but still an effective online platform for business is YouTube. That’s right the video sharing platform is excellent for promoting your brand and still remains hugely underutilized. This is probably because creating excellent video content is somewhat difficult. The results are worth it though.

For instance, YouTube receives almost 6 billion views per day and a view is counted as watching 30 seconds of a video, which is much higher than most other video platforms. Plus, Google ranks YouTube videos higher in their search results. Even better is the fact that YouTube is actually the second most popular search engine in the world.

Now, as good as YouTube is for business it does work a lot differently than other media platforms. For one, YouTube is not concerned with the total amount of views when they decide to rank a video. They look at other metrics such as the amount of time a user spends watching your videos, which is not publicly available.

Use Good Thumbnails

This is the best way to increase your engagement on YouTube. It is similar to how some new websites will use enticing headlines, but instead of an enticing headline, you need a visually stimulating thumbnail.

This is mostly because people actually look at the thumbnail first due to the large size of it compared to the title of the video. That is not to say that a title is unimportant. It just means that you need an amazing looking thumbnail to generate a decent amount of traffic to your video really.

Now, do not be a YouTube channel that uses an enticing thumbnail, but refuses to back it up with a video with any form of substance. That is just as bad and will lead to angry viewers.

Angry viewers will dislike the video and leave angry comments. Both of which YouTube can detect and will lower your overall engagement rate.

Guide Your Viewers to Certain Actions

YouTube offers plenty of different tools for getting viewers to take a certain action. You can also add your own annotations.

In other words, you should tell your viewers exactly what you want them to do. If you want them to like your video, then tell them to like your video. If you want them to subscribe, then tell them to subscribe.

You get the point. Some viewers will do it without any encouragement, but others will need a little reminder to take action.

Fortunately, you can easily add this into your video during the editing, or you can even add in an annotation via YouTube, whichever method works.

Just make sure to add something that tells the viewer to take a particular action. Annotations can even link out to a different website. This is especially useful for getting your viewers to a squeeze page of some sort or your business website.

Upload Short Videos

Short videos are the bread and butter of YouTube. An ideal length for a YouTube video is two to three minutes. Anything longer than that and people may skip your video because it is too long.

There is another reason why short videos are so important though. They also increase your video watch time. Video watch time is a metric that tracks the total percentage of a video your viewers watch. The higher the video watch time; the better it is for your engagement. This means you get a higher organic placement, allowing you to get even more YouTube views.

In fact, video watch time is arguably one of the most essential factors YouTube uses when they determine where to rank your video.

So make sure your videos are shorter than three minutes for the highest possible level of engagement.

You should also make sure that your video has something that grabs the attention of the viewer within the first ten seconds. This is called a “hook” and is one of the most important things you can do while making a YouTube video.

A good hook will evoke strong emotion from your viewer, but not spoil the entire topic of the video for them. An example of a good hook would be stating an interesting fact at the beginning of your video or doing a quick clip of an exciting part of your video. Anything that gets the viewer very interested in your video is beautiful.

The Same Marketing Principles Work on YouTube

YouTube is not really that much different from other online platforms. This means all the same general techniques that you learned for other platforms will work just fine on YouTube. They just might require some necessary modifications to make them work slightly better on YouTube.

First, you should always promote your videos across the internet. If you have a Facebook or Twitter, then make sure to promote your YouTube video on that platform. You can even comment on other channels if you have a relevant video, but make sure that the comment is not too spammy.

One of the best ways to promote your YouTube channel and video is to make each video into a blog post (or vice versa). This will push readers from your blog to your YouTube channel. Just make sure to include some unique information in your video and some unique information in your blog. Mention that you have unique content on each medium.

It forces people to consume more of your content for all their information, which only increases your total engagement rate.

Other than cross-promotion, you should also use proper keyword research. You can do keyword research on both Google and YouTube.

You would be surprised to find the amount of information available on blogs that no one has made a YouTube video about. Those are an excellent opportunity to make a video and then attempt to get various blogs to embed your video on their channel. In fact, that is one of the best options for growing your channel when you first begin.

Focus on low competition video topics and then get blogs to embed that video on their blog posts. It is extremely effective.

Final Thoughts

All in all, increasing your engagement rate on YouTube is not as difficult as you would probably think. Just follow the advice listed above and you will be well on your way to a higher engagement rate and all the benefits that come with it.