Youtube is not just videos: it’s stories, broadcasts and publications.

Youtube is no longer just videos. This platform has evolved into other formats such as publications, stories, and live broadcasts so that users have more and more options to interact.

Although its potential content is still videos, complete strategies can be developed around its possibilities. This represents a window of opportunity for content creators.

If we talk about numbers, more than one billion users have an open profile on YouTube. That represents almost a third of the entire Internet.

According to data provided by Youtube’s press department, one billion hours of video are played in one day alone. And users between 18 and 34 years old are the ones who watch the most content on this platform.

Just considering the activity of this audience, the reach is greater than that of any television network. So, its reach potential is indisputable.

However, this does not guarantee success. To start being visible in large digital communities, you want an effective content strategy that integrates video as the potential format to connect with more people.

What is Youtube for in a Content Marketing strategy?

Content, in this case, videos, will be the opportunity to connect with the audience. But if we do not pursue clear objectives, the strategy could get lost in a sea of competition without even being visible to the target audience.

This video network is a great opportunity to connect, however, it will not be possible without proper planning. What do you need to start? Very simple, study Youtube as a platform and analyze is the right way to use it according to your purposes.

For example, do you want to grow your audience? You can start by analyzing the most used search intentions in your niche and optimize your content so that it can be visible in the results.

If you happen to already have a community of followers on your YouTube channel and you want to drive traffic to your website, calls to action will be useful in your storytelling if you want to achieve this goal.

Or, you have a considerable number of subscribers but your goal is to increase interactions and consequently build loyalty with your brand, in this sense, live broadcasts may be the best option to interact with them and promote new conversations.

As you can see, objectives can determine the north of a strategy and the direction that all the actions to be executed will take. If you do not have specific, measurable and achievable objectives, it will be difficult to achieve results on this platform.

Because it is not simply a matter of publishing videos. It is necessary to devise a strategy that allows you to grow according to the possibilities of the platform.

Understand and optimize for Youtube

We cannot start using this platform without first analyzing how it operates. Identifying what works and what doesn’t can make your YouTube strategies a success. In this sense, according to Content Marketing Institute, Youtube has the premise of making users stay on the platform playing videos.

Therefore, unlike Google search engine optimization, which aims to respond to the search intent more immediately and supplying all the needs in the first result, Youtube chooses to continue recommending content and make users browse for longer.

Now, what are the indicators for Youtube’s algorithm, the article by Dennis Shiao from Content Marketing Institute specifies:

• Starts: these are the videos that lead users to start their navigation on this platform. In some cases, users start browsing on the home page, so Youtube shows recommendations from the history. However, the videos that will earn a spot on the home page are those that have been most successful as startup videos.
• Clock: This refers to the viewing time of the videos, not the length of time; if two videos are 5 minutes long, the one that will be more successful is the one that has been viewed longer.
• Session: This indicator refers to the videos that make the longest session of users on YouTube.

In addition to the positioning indicators, another aspect to consider is the influence of metadata. For example, the title, description, and tags, which, unlike what many may think, do not play such a relevant role in positioning.

In this sense, it is specified that the metadata is important for the video to gain visibility at the beginning, but then the quality is what will really determine its success.

After knowing how this platform works, we can take advantage of each of its formats, in order to develop an effective content strategy for YouTube.

Videos

This is the king format, video content can connect in many ways and use many resources to positively impact the viewer. Images, sounds, transitions, speech, all these elements unify a message that will remain in the user’s mind.

Video is an ideal format to tell stories, educate, entertain, inform, its versatility allows to fulfil several objectives simultaneously. Nowadays, brands resort to Video Marketing as much as to social media profiles to connect with the audience.

One of the characteristics that a successful video must meet is that it encourages viewers to spread it on other platforms. Either because it is useful, because it is entertaining, or because it addresses an interesting topic that they want to share with their followers.

A video does not necessarily have to be viral to be effective. But within a Content Marketing strategy, a video must promote interactions, and among the most important is the ability to share it with others. One strategy is being able to automate the process, and you can check out this article on Harnessing YouTube Automation: Boosting Business for Entrepreneurs for more info on that.

Another valuable resource when creating video content is storytelling. We all want to hear good stories, the best ones can stay in our minds for a long time, whoever manages to stimulate senses and emotions through the telling of a story has an incredible ability to connect with others.

If you want your videos to be successful on YouTube, and within your digital community, consider telling stories so that your message is more effective and has greater reach.

Now, just because it’s storytelling, doesn’t mean that the video should be excessively long. A good story can be told in a few minutes. Remember that your audience’s time is valuable, so make every second of the video memorable for them.

Additionally, if you expect your brand to achieve great goals within Youtube, it is important that in each piece of content you keep the voice and the essence that identifies you, remember that those distinctive elements will give you identity, and within a tide of content traffic as Youtube is, you will need it.

Live broadcasts

The trend of live broadcasts has been widely accepted by YouTube users, this format allows a closer interaction and consequently greater engagement with the brand.

Unlike videos, live broadcasts will be useful to measure interactions in real-time, so the type of content you plan for this format must be fully interactive.

Some ideas that may inspire you:

• Webinars
• Product demonstrations
• Interviews
• Answers to frequently asked questions from users
• The development of an event related to the brand

Stories

Stories are short videos, and in the case of YouTube, they expire after 7 days. Their intention is to reach the audience through a spontaneous message, allowing more informal and natural communication.

Within its functions, the creator can add elements such as stickers, filters, sounds, texts, so that the result can be really fun.

It is this spontaneity that differentiates stories from traditional videos or publications and they have become a way to communicate in a more human way, without production or scripts. The result is a great connection with the audience thanks to this potential.

This format within the YouTube platform is relatively new. It is allowed only for channels that have a community of more than 10,000 subscribers. Once you reach this goal, it could take approximately four weeks for your profile to already have active stories.

Now, Youtube has allowed content creators to have the ability to respond or highlight comments through the stories. This is really innovative and encourages great interaction with the audience.

We can no longer only imagine responding to comments with text, it is now possible to do so with videos or photographs thanks to this format.

Publications

Recently Youtube has added a “Community” tab, in order to strengthen the relationship between the followers of the channel and the creator of the content. So, in addition to videos, interactions can be created through publications, which could complement a content strategy.

This new feature now allows sharing images, GIFs, polls, sharing a list of your favourite videos to the channel’s followers, and best of all, you don’t necessarily have to be subscribed to be able to watch this content, so it could be a strategy to reach new audiences.

This new feature now allows you to share images, GIFs, make polls, share a list of your favourite videos to the channel’s followers, and best of all, you don’t necessarily have to be subscribed to see this content, so it could be a strategy to reach new audiences.

If these publications generate a positive impact on a new visitor, he/she could subscribe to the channel directly from the community tab.

The YouTube community suggests these recommendations to effectively use posts in the community tab:

• Survey your audience to gauge their impressions of your videos, or get their suggestions for upcoming content.
• Share images or GIFs about the best moments of your most recent videos.
• Promote your content and other creators.

Undoubtedly, this is a new feature that will allow you to make the most of the interactions with the audience, and create content in other formats, in addition to the video for the same YouTube platform. This new feature means more possibilities when creating content, more interactions and greater growth of the digital community.

Youtube bets on interaction

The real importance of Youtube is that its innovations expand the possibilities of interaction between content creators and the audience. That is, they are always thinking of new ways to make content, and allow the community to grow thanks to it.

It is no longer just about posting a video on the channel, Youtube is committed to facilitating connections between audiences and their favourite creators. More than a website for sharing videos, it is now a platform for creating digital communities around this format.