How to win a million hits

 

Will Critchlow

 

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Also in this section:

• The good gig guide

Jo Tanner

• Political communications that hit the target

Jon McLeod of Weber Shandwick

• Eastern promise

Will Robins

• Who's the daddy?

Harry Witchel

Will Critchlow reveals a strategy that will help make your video take off on YouTube 

 

 

It would be hard to be involved with marketing anything these days and not to have stumbled upon YouTube. The site where anyone can upload a video has been a phenomenon, and the most popular movies gain hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of views.

 

Despite this, many videos languish in obscurity. When this happens to a marketer or a politician, it results in a handful of views, a comment or two and a dent in the ego of the creator. There are, however, things you can do to increase the chances of success with your videos (and it's not all about making a great video; which is a subject for another day).

 

In the political arena, one of the most highly-rated videos of all time is Daniel Hannan's "devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government" speech, in which the then littleknown Conservative MEP berated Gordon Brown during his visit to the European Parliament. Probably the most significant factor in the success of this video, after the attractiveness of the content, was the early spike in views garnered via a coordinated release from Hannan's PR machine.

 

What can you do to give it a better chance of success?

 

The main thing after understanding the medium is to understand the channel. By this I mean understanding where viewers come from and how the social element of YouTube amplifies success. Videos typically get viewers from three main sources:

• External links to the YouTube page - from other websites, email forwards, instant message conversations and Facebook walls.
  
• Embedded videos on sites other than YouTube - typically blogs whose authors embed the video in a post rather than just linking to the YouTube page. This category also includes embedding the video on your official website.
  
• Internal traffic from within YouTube - videos that get a spike of views or ratings appear on 'most popular' or 'top rated' lists within categories. Viewers of these categories (or other related videos) are then directed to your video. This amplification effect is potentially the most important to understand.

 

Based on these effects, we will consider two primary ways to increase your video's chances of success:

• Categorisation and tagging
• Influencing the initial popularity of your video

 

 

Categorisation and tagging
Because search engine spiders can't (yet) watch videos and determine their content, it is important that your video has useful and accurate metadata. What this means is that the information you provide about the video is very important in how it is categorised and displayed to users.

 

When you upload a video to YouTube, you should carefully consider how to title it and what other textual information you provide about it. Before writing any of this, take a step back and consider what is popular and highly searched for. Ideally, you have already chosen a popular and interesting subject for your video, but at this stage it pays to consider exactly how people search for this subject area.

 

Google Insights is good for this: http://www.google.com/insights/search/. For instance, if your video was targeted at youngsters looking to get into politics, you would find that "become an MP" is a more popular search term than "work in politics" - so you could get more views by using the former description.

 

There are two big benefits to having considered your title and other textual information early in the process: firstly YouTube is a search engine in its own right and, secondly, Google is embedding video results in many regular search results.

 

 

Initial popularity

As with traditional bestseller lists, it is worth trying to make sure that you generate the maximum number of views in as short a timeperiod as possible. By coordinating the release on your own website, having friendly bloggers and journalists embed your video, and by promoting it via email bulletins, on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites you give your video a better chance of appearing in the day's hottest videos in its various categories. If it gets to this point, the quality of the content is given a chance to shine through and become truly viral.

 

 

 

Will Critchlow is a director of Distilled - an online reputation management consultancy