Edelman distributes a weekly list of digital tips and tricks to all of its worldwide employees called the Friday5. Today I had the honor of authoring a Friday5 about YouTube best practices.

Make the Most of YouTube

Why It Matters

YouTube recently reached one billion views per day. They’ve also gone live, increased advertising opportunities and updated their channel and video editing capabilities.

Embrace Clip Culture.

Keep your video short and deliver your message quickly. Effective short-form YouTube videos should be under two minutes. Incorporate unique visuals, flashy graphics and known personalities to keep eyeballs glued to your video.

Quality over quantity.

You don’t have to put out a video every week to keep your channel interesting. Determine the most compelling way to connect your message with your audience – humor, anger, fear, breaking news, etc. – and weave this tone into your video’s message. One compelling video is always more effective than five boring videos.

Some popular YouTube channels evolve into “vlogs” where they post short videos on a hyper-regular basis. This is only effective once you have developed a solid subscriber base, and the most successful vlogs manage to be attention-grabbing every time.

Tag, tag, tag.

YouTube uses the same Google search algorithm to crawl and index videos for search. However, the bots aren’t watching your video – they are looking at your title, description and tags.

Tag liberally and include tags for any topics, people, organizations, locations and ideas that are mentioned in the video or are related to the content of the video. Also, you can add tags to your YouTube channel in the “Edit Channel” form. These tags should be more general terms that describe your organization and channel as a whole.

Promote it.

YouTube advertising is no longer just for the Brand Channels that spend thousands of dollars to partner with YouTube. YouTube’s new Promoted Videos program works just like Google AdWords – you design your ad, choose your keywords and bid on a cost-per-click basis. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world – take advantage of the traffic and promote your video.

YouTube provides a Call-to-Action Overlay that is unique to Promoted Videos. This semi-transparent bar displays a title and URL over the bottom of your video and allows you to link your video to any website you choose.

Measurement beyond views.

The most common YouTube statistic is views, but this does not tell the whole story of your video’s success. Use YouTube Insight to drill down to daily view counts, as well as demographic and geographic view distribution, and look at “community engagement” statistics to see when viewers are rating and commenting on your video.

When you upload a video, use TubeMogul to examine viewer when viewers stop watching your video, where your video is embedded, detailed geographic breakdowns and more.

How do you make the most of YouTube?