Some YouTube Changes That Can Help Your Conversion

I happened to come across some drastic changes on the video pages on YouTube that I think you should take a look at and put a strategy together on how to best take advantage of them.

Here is a screenshot from an Andrew Hand video with some of the changes outlined.

Hopefully you can see the differences, but for those that are wondering the biggest change is moving the video description and embed options to under the video. Before they had been on the right side of the video.

What does this means to you as a musician and for the marketing of your videos?

Off the top of my head I can think of a few important issues, although they are not new, they are now very important.

Subscribe Button

The gold channel subscribe button is now grey and above your video. Thus your call to action for subscribers now needs to say something like, “if you want to subscribe to our channel, click that little grey button that is hovering over my head right about now.”

Username

While it’s always been important to have a great username, this is really evident on the new layout. Your username is now prominent in 2 locations on the video page. At the top and right before the description. You want to be sure that you have a powerful brand username (hopefully your artist name) and you want to be sure that your channel is all about your music, your career, etc as it looks like you will have the potential to get more clicks back to your channel page than in the previous YouTube layout.

Video Link + Description

I actually really like this adjustment for marketing purposes. The description for the video is now directly under the video, a great position for the eyes to go while they are watching the video. Many YouTube users are used to looking under the video to leave a comment or rate a video. You now have the opportunity to insert your link as well as an attention grabbing description and get eyeballs to actually check it out.

Some things to note:

URL still needs to be a complete URL – http://www.yoursite.com/landingpage

Description length. Here is where I have seen a change. Before I was advising to optimize the first 140 – 140 characters in the description. It now looks like that number has decreased. I checked out 4 videos and came up with 112, 110, 111 and 110 characters. So its pretty safe to say that your most important words needs to be be within that 110 character set.

This includes your URL, so sending them to http://www.yoursite.com/crazyasslandingpage/anothercrazyasspage/date.html is probably not a good look.

Obviously they can click to see a longer description, however if your first 140 characters don’t get their attention, then they won’t click to see the rest anyway.

This may be a big one as far as SEO + related videos, but I don’t have enough research yet – Tags and categories have disappeared from being seen initially and can be found by expanding the description.

Overall Initial Thoughts

So any change is going to have some heartburn. All those videos where you said the call to action is on the right, well those videos are pretty much irrelevant now, however most fans are smart enough to look around for the CTA.

Overall having the descriptions below is going to be a good move to encourage clicks to both your website and to your profile. Your goal still needs to be to make a kick ass video and include a call-to-action, get people to your squeeze page and sign them up to your list. This format should help you do that!

What do you think? I didn’t even get into the thumbs up or down, but hey, why don’t you play with it and let me know!

Let’s chop it up in the comments.

-Greg

Tags: Music Marketing, video marketing, youtube