Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine, with more searches than Bing, Yahoo!, and AOL combined?
In fact, 17% of all Internet traffic flows through YouTube; more B2C marketers create video content than blogs (74% versus 67%); and among B2B marketers, video is cited as the most-used content type (92%), outranking surveys (88%), white papers (88%) and case studies (87%).
Despite YouTube’s precedence as a content discovery engine, many marketers fail to leverage the platform. Here are 6 best practices to help you make the most of the viable video channel!
1. Publish Youtube content with consistency to grow an engaged audience.
Content marketing research repeatedly points to one simple adage as the secret to success on YouTube: consistency.
According to Pixability’s YouTube report of the Top 100 Global Brands, top aggregate brands published 78 videos per month.
Top media brands, which are the most successful industry on YouTube, published 500 videos per month, in comparison.
2. Utilize robust tagging and multiple channels to help your videos get found.
Apart from posting 78 videos per month, the top 25% of the brands used twice as many video tags and had twice as many channels as the lower 25%, showcasing the importance of utilizing these two YouTube features.
Additionally, 56 of the top 100 brands have 10 or more YouTube channels, and only 1 of the 100 does not have a YouTube channel.
3. Post during peaks in YouTube viewership.
The next question we asked naturally revolved around the best times and days to upload a video to YouTube. Frederator Networks, which runs over 1,300 YouTube channels, put together an analysis of their channels, revealing several useful posting trends.
According to their data, the best times of day to post on YouTube are:
- Monday-Wednesday: 2pm-4pm EST
- Thursday-Friday: Noon-3pm EST
- Saturday-Sunday: 9am-11am EST
From their graph below, we can also detect which are the best days to upload to YouTube.
Viewership begins to increase on Thursday through Saturday and declines on Sunday. This data suggests that the best day to post a video is on Thursday/Friday in order to gain the most viewers from the weekend.
4. Offer snackable content with “bite-size” videos (ideally 16 seconds - 2 minutes in length).
How about a YouTube video’s ideal length? According to a report on the 300 most-viewed brand channels, the most common YouTube video is between 31 seconds and one minute long.
When taking a look at the most engaging uploads, videos that were between 16 seconds and 2 minutes in length had 53.8% of all YouTube views.
5. Use multi-lingual captions to connect with an international audience.
Interestingly, about 80% of YouTube traffic comes outside of the United States. As a result, most YouTube viewers are not English-speakers. Google reports that “60% of all video views on YouTube come from users who select a language other than English as the site’s display language.”
Luckily, YouTube has a feature that can automatically generate captions for your content. (Just don’t forget to check for accuracy; you can edit the captions yourself as well).
Fullscreen, which ran an experiment on their top channel, found that creating subtitles in several languages increased their YouTube search traffic by 19% and audience retention by 12% after several months.
6. Make sure your videos are optimized for mobile!
Finally, keep in mind that 40% of YouTube videos are viewed on mobile devices, so keep the small screen in mind when creating videos to ensure there are no small objects or messages that are difficult to see.
In summary… here are your key YouTube takeaways!
- The top 25 global brands consistently publish 78 videos per month
- In the aggregate, the BEST times to post on YouTube are on Thursdays and Fridays between 12-3pm EST
- YouTube videos between 16 seconds and 2 minutes in length get the most engagement
- If it makes sense for your target, consider expanding your international reach via multi-lingual captions
- Make sure your videos are easy to see on mobile devices!
Armed with these stats and simple best practices, your brand’s YouTube channel will be primed to engage many more eyes and ears!
