As you have probably heard, web video is now massive and you need to be doing it otherwise your business is going to fail fail fail!

OK, so that’s not really going to happen, but scare tactics aside there is great opportunity through integrating video content into your marketing plan.

YouTube is now the world's second largest search engine and in 2011 there were 140 online video views for every person on the planet.

As well as raising awareness of your brand, video also serves to build trust and respect in your brand and can increase website conversion rates significantly.

Although you can choose to host your video on your own server or on a range of platforms it does make sense to go with the Google owned overlord as your base. The reason being is that your videos get easy entry into the two largest search engines in the world. Additionally it is incredibly easy to embed and share videos that are hosted on YouTube.

So, assuming that you are sold on having a YouTube channel for your business we will now look at how to optimise your channel for usability.

Editing Your Profile

Firstly, we will take a look at editing your profile. On your main channel landing page you will see that the profile subtitle and description have moved from the left to the right hand side in the new YouTube design (December 2011).

You can see in the screenshot below that you can simply click “edit” (top right) to make changes.

In the old YouTube profile there was a single followed link that you could add but unfortunately this has now been removed.

The About section is now just for plain text. There are three things that you can do here:

1. Write an overview of the channel in the About section to tell users about the channel and what they can expect to find there.
    
2. Link your social profiles. This is very limited at the moment: just Google+, Twitter and Facebook. A note of caution here; Google+ will automatically link up the Google+ account that is connected through the same Google account that your YouTube channel is attached to. If you need to attach your Google+ account from a separate login then see Number 3 below. The Facebook link is also really shoddy; it only allows you to connect to a personal Facebook profile and not a business page at the moment. Users have been complaining about this for well over a year and YouTube has so far been reluctant to fix. Again see Number 3.
    
3. Here you can add any links that you like. We have added a link to our homepage, our corporate video product page and also to our blog. You can then add in the links to your Facebook business page, Google+ business page or any other web properties that you like. We didn’t test out the limits to the number of links but it is over 10.
   
   Note: The icon image for the links pulls from the favicon image from the linked website; so if your link is lacking an image then you need to update the favicon on your website (if you are not sure what I am talking about see this page - http://www.favicon.com/ie.html).
   
   Once the links are in place you can shuffle their order by simply dragging and dropping until you are happy with them.

Below the link area there is another text field for you to explain more about your business. I suggest that you use the main text field at the top to summarise your YouTube channel and the second one to summarise your business (or yourself if you are a freelancer/individual channel). Think about your use of keywords, as although there are no links this information will be used for search ranking. It is also worth entering your locational information as it could help with location based searches in both Google and YouTube.

Below this you can also add other channels that you have or that you like as seen in the screenshot here. Just type the channel name, save it and hit apply to save the changes to your channel.

For the homepage, that is about it.

YouTube Channel Views

At the top of your channel you will see that there are three tabs: • Featured • Feed • Videos. The feed tab (shown in the screenshot below) contains all of the activity that you have participated in on YouTube; whether you comment on others videos, receive comments, like a video, upload a video etc.

Users can comment on your channel by using the “post a channel comment” box on the right hand side of the home screen – shown in the screenshot above. You can control the freedoms that users have by clicking settings and choosing one of the three options shown above. We leave ours open as there is not a lot of commentary at the moment, but if you want to manage this more closely the option is there. All comments are shown on the feed tab.

To the right of the feed tab is the videos tab. There are two views in here; firstly the default view shows your uploaded videos. This shows all the latest videos that you have uploaded. You will see in the screenshot below that we have ours set to “newest to oldest” but you could also sort by “most popular” or “oldest to newest”.

The other view shows your playlists; you can flip between the two by clicking on the buttons to the left of the screen as shown below.

Finally, there is the featured tab, which is optional and customisable from your settings to show a video of your choice and below it playlists of your choice (or other layouts – we will get to this in a minute). You can select which one of these three screens to show to users when they hit your page; we use the featured tab as it gives us full control of the user experience (at least on first arrival at the channel).

Edit YouTube Channel

To adjust the basic settings of your channel you need to click the “Edit Channel” button on the top right of the homepage.

On the “Appearance” tab you can choose the new or old version of YouTube, you can upload an avatar and you can select a background image and a colour.

There are many YouTube channels with background images that look excellent and help businesses to promote their contact details, products, services and to add some personality to the channel. However, we found that getting this right for a number of different screen resolutions and devices was tricky. So for now have left it with a plain image that works for all resolutions, it also serves to draw attention to the content within the channel.

Secondly there is the info and settings tab (shown below). Here you can edit the title of your channel as well as the main description; this is the same one that you can edit on the homepage in the top right. You can also insert a number of tags that summarise your channel.

Focus on the keywords that relate to you and that also have some search volume. Here you can select which of the three views that we discussed above. Again we opted for the featured tab. You can also select or deselect to have subscribed users go straight to your feed. This will be down to your user experience on the various tabs and what works best for you; give all options a try and see how the engagement varies (use the analytics tab for an understanding of user engagement – we will get to that in a minute).

Finally under the Featured Tab (shown below) you can adjust the presentation of your homepage; obviously very important if you have set this to be your main landing page.

There are four options:

1. Creator – You have one featured video at the top and then the page shows your featured playlists below. This is great for most individuals and business channels as it gives a broad view of your content, especially if you feature your content under a range of topics.
    
2. Blogger – described by YouTube as “A reverse chronological vlogroll of a featured playlist or your recent activity”.
    
3. Network – this would be great if you are aggregating content on your channel or if you have a number of channels that you want to promote but probably not the best option for most businesses wishing to showcase their own videos.
    
4. Everything – pretty much what it says on the tin; you have a featured video, then featured playlists followed by some featured channels.

Social Sharing with YouTube

If you click on the drop down in the top right of the channel you will see an option for “settings”. There is a lot in here and we will not cover all of this today as really I am just seeking to take you through the cosmetic aspects of your channel, but it is worth exploring to see what you can do.

One of the settings that does affect the user experience side of your channel is the sharing options. This allows you to control both, how the activity that you are involved in on YouTube is presented in your YouTube feed as well as your connected social channels.

We have set ours to share everything at the moment as we are only connected to Twitter through the account link up; the settings you choose will depend on your behaviour within YouTube as well as the content that you are receiving from other users and it’s applicability to each of your linked social networks.

It means that you need to really take care of everything that you do and say on YouTube as it will be publicly visible, not just where you interact, but also on your home feed and across your linked social networks.

YouTube Analytics

Although it is not necessary to use YouTube Analytics for the set up of your channel it should be referred to frequently once you have content on the channel.

If you are a Google Analytics user (and even if not) it will all be pretty straightforward as you can just see which videos are viewed and how they are interacted with and on what devices.

You can also see things such as:

• Geography
• Demographics
• Traffic sources
• Devices
• Subscribers
• Likes/Dislikes
• Shares
• Comments.

This data is fantastic at pointing you in the right direction with not just your channel set up but also with the content production.

A note on the author

My Web Presenters have pioneered and built the market leading technology for using web presenters on your website. They offer web video production and marketing that evokes an emotional response in the viewer and brings them closer to your brand.