1. Add captions. Captions are especially helpful when your audio quality is not excellent. Auto-captioning is an option that is available on YouTube so this should not be too laborious. Just make sure to not rely on it completely and edit your captions for accuracy. Adding captions makes your videos more accessible to more viewers including the hearing impaired audience.
2. Avoid using annotations. Annotations in YouTube refer to the text appearing over the top of the video (usually at the bottom). Annotations can be quite annoying and distracting. Use and maximize the available space for titles and descriptions. Like we said in our previous post, when it comes to social media marketing, subtlety is key.
3. Be vigilant. While you want to encourage your viewers to share their thoughts, it is also likely that you will get negative comments from some viewers. Do not instantly remove these comments especially if they are valid, objective and relevant. However, if you are being regularly attacked with spam or inflammatory messages for no valid reason at all, you can delete or block that user to avoid further damage. Use this as a last resort, if possible. As a precautionary measure, you can choose to moderate comments before they go live but be sure to exercise good judgment.
4. Organize your videos. Do not just lump them together. Make it more viewer-friendly by creating relevant playlists. YouTube offers viewers the option to embed entire playlists so make sure you group them into something that could be useful to your viewers.
5. Take advantage of YouTube’s free analytics tool. This free-to-view information provides valuable data such as viewer stats, demographics, community and “discovery” data. The latter refers to how the users found your video including the links that led them to your channel. Check out the “Insight” button on every video to help you get started on this very useful tool.
