Summing It Up

10 Video Tips: Making Video for YouTube

  

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YouTube isn’t just a video platform, it is also a social network. 400 tweets per minute contain a YouTube video, and YouTube’s search bar is the number two search bar on the Internet, second only to Google.

Collectively we spend 2.9 billion hours on YouTube in one month. So, if you’re using social media for marketing, YouTube has the potential to be an important part of your overall strategy.

Here are the 10 tips we share with our clients on making video for YouTube

1. Keep it Short – The best videos are short. . . no longer than 5 minutes and best if under two minutes. The longer the video the more it must change scenes. I have seen effective videos go as long as 8 minutes but they do this by splicing together 15-30 second clips.
2. Low Friction Transfers – Videos must be easy to share. These means embedding and email functions should be built into the video itself. YouTube does this for you. Uploading an .mov or .wmv to your website is not good enough.
3. Be Funny – Funny videos get more views and are remembered well.
4. Offer a service – How-to videos go all over the internet. Help people and they will spread the word about your video.
5. Be relevant – Videos on current events get lots of hits. You're not running for President this year, but you can still tie in to national news or important season dates like Presient's Day, or the beginning of a new month, spring break, etc. Use these seasonal dates to help get your message across.

6. Pick a Interesting Thumbnail & Title – Make sure the thumbnail is interesting and high quality. There are millions of other videos on YouTube. If you want someone to watch your you must convince them that your video is more interesting than all the other videos on YouTube. Your title and thumbnail will either save you or kill you.
7. Promote Like Crazy – Don’t expect your video to just take off. If you want the video to go viral you need to infect a lot of people all at once. Otherwise the other 100k videos will drowned you out. Get your blogger friends to post your video, get it on Facebook & Twitter.
8. Use a Tripod – Using a tripod will give you much better quality than going handheld. This is particularly true with compressed videos like the ones on YouTube.
9. Good Audio Quality –If there is one thing that kills online videos it is poor audio. If you want a successful video, tear the microphone out of your camera and get creative. Ways of employing good audio include:
   
   
   • Use clips off of the TV – This is considered fair use for short clips.
   • Consider Using Only Music – Videos that use music, pictures and text can be effective. The key is to have good music, powerful pictures and well worded text.
   • External Mic – If you want live footage use a handheld mic, shotgun or a lapel mic.
   • Good Compression Quality – The best way to keep the quality up is to upload directly from Apple iLife 08. If you don’t use a mac for your video editing consider it. The higher the resolution the better.  Use an effective codec (like H.264) if you can’t upload directly from iLife.
     
     
10. Use Studio Lights – Video is not as important as audio but is still vital.  The key to good video is good lighting. Investing in some lights and an external mic will do more for your videos than buying that fancy new camera you’ve been eying. It’s definitely cheaper, too!