During my training sessions with non-profits I have noticed that many are not taking advantage of the new web analytics being offered by YouTube. I wanted to write about what you can measure using YouTube Insight, provide tips for improving your YouTube channel, and highlight a few non-profits that I think are doing a great job with their channel.
I think it’s important to know how any marketing initiative is performing, so if you haven’t already, I would encourage you to log into YouTube Insight to see how many people are looking at your YouTube videos. I will show you information such as:
- how many people have viewed your video over a specific time period
- Where those viewers come from by demographic and geographic location.
- how people are finding your videos (web search, YouTube search, link from your website. etc…)
Tips for Improving your YouTube Channel:
Once you’ve taken a look at your numbers, here are a few quick tips to help you increase the traffic to your videos:
- Make your account name the name of your non-profit, not something cute that no one will search on.
- Use the profile section to describe your non-profit using words from your keyword list.
- Link back to your website in the website field
- When you upload video content – make sure your video’s file name has descriptive words in it. Ditto with the title and tags.
- Add a donation button
- Link to you YouTube account from your other social media profiles and your website
- Upload your YouTube videos into Facebook (your personal profile or your group profile) and take advantage of the fact that it’s currently the largest video sharing site.
Non-Profits that have Good YouTube Channels
Here are a few non-profits that I think are doing a good job optimizing their YouTube Channel and branding it to look like their non-profit:
- The Green Children
Greenpeace - Defenders of Wildlife
- Montgomery Bay Aquarium – I especially like that they are encouraging visitors to upload their own video.
- And this last channel is pure brilliance – the channel uses keywords and the organization is marketing it to their demographic – men tend to go online to watch funny videos. You seriously have to watch this video about self examination for testicular cancer. It got picked up by YouTube on “Trend Spotting Tuesdays” and received over 600,000 hits in it’s first 24-hour period.
Non-Profits YouTube Channels with Potential
And here are some suggestions for non-profits that are doing a decent job but could tweak a few things and do even better:
Amnesty International – they could do a better job incorporating their keyword research, start using tags, and label the titles of their videos with frequently searched keywords.
Filed under: SEM, YouTube | Tagged: nonprofit video, tips to optimize YouTube channel, YouTube, YouTube Insight, YouTube nonprofit channel | 3 Comments »
