Finding the hidden features of YouTube

Mark Frary

October 2, 2013

by Mark Frary

YouTube is the video platform of choice for a sizeable proportion of the planet. The latest statistics put out by the Google-owned site reveal that more than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month, more than 6 billion hours of video are watched each month – 50% more than last year – and that 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

As well as being a place to find music videos and the latest cat clip, YouTube has some very interesting features under the bonnet that should be of interest to any travel brand wanting to market themselves with video – and if you are not then do you get out often enough?

Not many people know that YouTube features its own simple video editor. It allows you to do various things to videos uploaded to your own channel, including adding text captions, splitting clips and discarding bits that you don’t need and adding smooth transitions between the clips that remain.

The video editor also gives you access to a library of royalty-free music tracks that you can easily add to your video, ranging from classics like the 1812 Overture and Handel’s Messiah to punk.

Uploading to YouTube is just a case of pushing a button.

For a small travel company that does not have the budget to hire a video crew to shoot professional video this is a good way into creating original video content. Shoot on a smartphone, upload direct to YouTube then edit, add some music and text and publish. Think about shooting clips about people, the characters who can bring a destination, hotel or travel business to life with a wry anecdote or a story about how the local food gets from field to plate.

Once you have uploaded some clips this way you will probably want to know how well they are doing. This is where YouTube analytics comes in. Sign into your channel (or create one from YouTube or using a Google account) if you haven’t already and navigate to the YouTube video manager.

Select Analytics from the left-hand navigation. You can see how many people have watch your clip, how long they watched for and at what point they clicked the stop button – a great way of working out what how long your videos should be and finding out what people like and don’t like.

The video manager also gives access to some very useful ways of enhancing your videos further. Next to the thumbnail of your clip there is an Edit button and dropdown menu. Two menu items worthy of mention here. Info and settings allows you, among other things, to change the thumbnail shown when people search – a strong image can boost your traffic enormously. Annotations lets you add things like speech bubbles and overlay text on your videos.

Perhaps best of all, it also allows you to add something called a Spotlight which can be set up to add a hyperlink. You just set the time in your video that you want the spotlight and its link to appear so if you had a product video, for example, you could end up with a call to action with a link to the product’s booking page. To get this to work you need to enable external annotation links as shown below, otherwise YouTube will only allow you to link to other YouTube videos. You need to make sure you don’t use copyrighted video or audio clips as otherwise you may not be allowed to enable external links – the company does check these things.

These are just a few of the things that YouTube offers and new features are added all the time. Just have a poke around and see how you can really take your video to a new level.