Lessons from a new Youtuber

Just for fun, I took some time this weekend to assemble some 1 take videos and upload them to Youtube.

Before yesterday, I hadn’t had much experience using Youtube as a creator.

LESSONS LEARNED:

• Viewing in Google Cardboard – If you’re hoping to have viewers enjoy your videos in their Google Cardboard, they’ll need a moment to tap the icon on their phones, install their phone into the headset properly, and get it up or attach the device to their face.  I created an opening placard that instructs people to do that and held it on screen for about 8 seconds.  After testing this several times, I’m thinking I may update that time to about 10 seconds in future videos.  We’ll see how that goes.
• Tagging – I’ve yet to see the fruits of this labor on this, but tags (like hashtags) seem to be key to getting your videos viewed.  Youtube gives you 500 characters to tagging, so there’s plenty of latitude there.
• Video Thumbnail – Now that your video has come up in a search, what’s going to make people choose to click on it over another, similar video?  Like tagging, your Thumbnail also seems to be very important to getting those eyeballs to your media.  Youtube has it’s own Thumbnail creator which is easy to use and does a pretty good job.  You can access it through their Creator Studio once you’ve uploaded your video.  Otherwise, if you have an image editing program like Photoshop, and create one from scratch.  I plan to give this a go in future videos to see if I can establish a consistent template for you thumbnails.
• Thumbs Up & Subscribe – OK, now that you’ve got people looking at your media, you want to get your media to a larger audience.  You’ll notice on several Youtube channels that creators will often petition for your Thumbs Up & Subscribes.  As far as I can tell, these numbers establishes you popularity and can potentially get you higher up in search results.  I created a simple “Thanks for watching!” slate at the end of my video with the “Thumbs Up” and “Subscribe” icons.  Not having any viewers yet, myself, I cannot attest to the success or failure of this effort.  I guess time will tell.

I know there are a lot of Youtube rockstars out there, so if any one of you happen to be reading this, I’d love for you to weigh in on my amateur observations.  Similarly, if you’re learning yourself, and have any words of wisdom or questions, please chime in and share your thoughts.

Until next time…  Keep it real in the Virtual.  But most of all, NJOYVR.