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Ever since January, YouTube has been gradually introducing their new design. It is now fully integrated across the entire video service, and has shown some promising results. With the redesign leading to a 6% increase in playbacks and a 7% increase in viewing more content (according to MediaPost), you can assume the new design is here to stay.
Hence, the focus of this article. The redesigning of YouTube has led to a lot of changes that every marketer should know about. Below, I will discuss some of the primary changes with the new YouTube design and how they can be leveraged to your advantage.
1. YouTube visitors can conduct searches while watching videos
By incorporating the search bar in the upper-right corner of the screen, anyone can now conduct searches while viewing videos. If you didn’t already have it, this should give you the drive to create more compelling and engaging content. Through creating more compelling content, users will not only stay to watch the whole video, but it increases the liklihood that they’ll share it with their friends.
2. Next Up Video: Browser-based suggestions?
You may have noticed in the right column of a YouTube page, there is a Next Up Video box. This video is selected based on how the person arrived at the page. While this means that YouTube has probably tapped into Google to collect information from the user’s browser, it can possibly be used to your advantage. While I haven’t experimented with it yet, keyword targeting and landing page optimization may allow you to control what video shows up in this box. That way, you can get users to automatically view your videos after they have finished watching their initial one. Definitely something to think about…
3. Star-rating system replaced by Like and Dislike
Replacing the 5-star rating system with Like and Dislike buttons makes the voting process easier. Even though this will lead to a broader-based voting system, it encourages more people to vote for your videos. By having a larger sample size of votes, you can determine whether or not people like the content you are providing.
4. Democratic-based Commenting
Every comment posted on a video can also be “Liked” or “Disliked”. The more “Likes” a comment receives, the higher up it moves in the comment list. This will help bury all the spammy comments and show all the relevant ones. By posting helpful and relevant comments, you can now potentially take advantage of that video’s traffic by being the top comment.
5. Easily-accessible Statistics
While this feature has been around for as long as I can remember, it is now accessible by clicking on the View arrows. This allows you to see where people are finding that specific video on the web. As you may have already realized, this can be a great way to collect competitive intelligence on how you can leverage your videos on popular, niche-based websites. Just remember, while you can analyze the statistics of everyone’s videos, everyone can also analyze yours.
So, I hope this not only helps give you a clearer insight on the new design of YouTube, but also ideas in which you can leverage it to your marketing advantage.
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