It’s a typical annoyance of the infinite content loop served up by social media platforms. You go to the trouble of creating a company video, edit it tightly, find the perfect voiceover, then upload it on YouTube.
Then, what does YouTube do as soon as the video has finished? It directs the viewer straight to another video made by someone who does the same thing you do. Nice one, YouTube!
Nobody can fully dictate which video YouTube wants to show or recommend after yours, as its all down to the algorithms used by the site, but there are things you can do to make YouTube more likely to stop sending viewers elsewhere. First of all, though, it’s important to understand that there are two different ways YouTube recommends the next video to the viewer.
One is in a grid of nine videos, where the view has to click on the one they want to watch next. Below is a screenshot of some suggestions I got at the end of a video I watched.
I can tell that these are based on my own YouTube viewing history, as they have nothing to do with the video I just watched. There are a few football ones there, a couple of music videos from Soccer Mommy and Fontaines D.C., and a couple of videos about large vehicles because of some research I was doing for one of our clients. If you see a competitor’s video among these, don’t panic too much, as it’s based on what you’ve been watching, so these recommendations will be different for different viewers.
The other method is ‘Up Next’, and this more of an ‘autoplay’ feature. Sometimes if you do nothing when a video finishes, another one will come on automatically. For example, after watching this video from the Engage Web channel, another of our clips was YouTube’s choice of ‘Up Next’ video when it ended, as the below screenshot shows.
It’s ideal that on this occasion, another one of our videos was lined up to come on straight after, but how can you improve the chances of this happening? Here are a few ways:
Upload lots of videos
The more content you have on your YouTube channel, the more related material you are creating, so YouTube becomes more likely to recommend another one of your videos.
Obviously, don’t just create videos for the sake of content, but in the same way that regular high-quality blogging is good for search engine optimisation, regularly filming and uploading useful videos gives you a real YouTube presence and builds your account into a meaningful authority on your sector.
Use tags and descriptions
YouTube might be a visual medium, but its algorithms rely on text, so give them meaningful and descriptive titles, an accurate and detailed description, and use tags. If you would particularly like one of your videos to follow on from another, use the same tags in both.
Being descriptive with text also increases the odds of searchers finding your video in the first place, especially if they want to find the answer to a question.
Embed them on your site
If possible, it’s better for people to watch your YouTube videos without leaving your website. If you’re alluding to one of your videos somewhere on your site, then rather than including a link to the video, why not embed it on your website? With most content management systems, including WordPress, you can do this simply by pasting the URL of the video into your copy.
All I’ve done to get the video above to display was go to YouTube, and copy and paste the URL above this paragraph.
If you need help with filming and optimising company videos, please get in touch with us at Engage Web.
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