Making the Most of YouTube

Content, Planning, and Luck are Keys to Success

By Scott Lewis
Managing Director, Willard PR Kyiv

Anyone can post a video on YouTube, but with tens of thousands of videos being uploaded daily, it can difficult to get your video noticed.  The key to success in the cluttered and highly competitive YouTube environment - and other video-sharing sites as well - boils down to three components: content, planning, and well, luck.

Most of the videos submitted to YouTube are far from professional in either content or production value, yet professionally produced, interesting clips regularly go unnoticed, while home-made clips become wildly successful.  A clip that goes viral tends to get posted on numerous other sites and blogs, usually as a link to the original YouTube video.  If it attracts the attention of news media, views can skyrocket: take, for instance, the clip of a New Zealand couple's baby dancing to Beyonce's 'Single Ladies' video: It has generated 3.8 million views, and spawned its own website - singlebabies.com - which the parents are using to prolong their infant's celebrity and to solicit funds for the toddler's college education.

One Ukrainian video has surpassed even the New Zealand baby's clip in popularity.  The clip from STB's 'Ukraine's Got Talent' program shows Ksenia Simonova's show-stopping performance.  The clip, which was uploaded by an anonymous user with the screen name Iamlikeasea, has received 4.55 million views, and is a perfect case study in YouTube success.  The video had an unusual topic - Ms. Simonova has the remarkable ability to 'paint' pictures in sand that tell a story, all while synchronized to music.  She won the nationwide talent contest, and the clip has attracted views and media attention from around the world.

It would be easy to dismiss the person who posted the clip as merely being lucky.  He (or she) denies being a video hobbyist or connected with the artist or STB - he just uploaded the video because he liked it.  Iamlikeasea gives the credit for the clip's success to its content, rather than to anything he did to promote it.   

While luck may have played a part in the video's success, in an e-mail interview he says that he was "astonished" by the number of views it has received.   "This madness started somewhere in August. I received hundreds of comments, subscriptions, and invitations to be friends.  Many people wrote thinking that I am Kseniya Simonova.  I'm glad that now she has started a YouTube channel of her own, so that I can refer people to it."

A great topic and a bit of luck go a long way, but it is hard to achieve real success without knowing something about the site's technical needs.

Just as Google searches for words, YouTube is a search engine for video.  Like Google users, YouTube users are either browsing or searching.  That is, either people go to the site for a specific reason (to learn how to play poker or to imitate Michael Jackson's famous 'moonwalk' dance step, for instance) or they're just browsing for something entertaining to watch.  The site is designed to help both types of user find what they want: there's a search function as well as an area on the home page that displays videos other users are watching at the moment - a great place to find out what's fresh and hot on the 'Tube.

But because YouTube's computers can't watch the videos, the site relies on the people who post clips to add titles and 'tags' - descriptive keywords that will help the search engine to categorize and viewers to locate your clip. 

Like a story in a newspaper, the clip's headline 'sells' it to readers.  It should intrigue and entice viewers, while giving viewers an idea of what they'll be seeing. 

"Probably, it is necessary to pay more attention to the title," Iamlikeasea wrote. "I wrote the name of the Simonova video in English because I wanted an audience that wasn't limited to Ukraine.  I suppose that this played a role in the popularity of the video, because other Kseniya Simonova videos titled in Russian could be found on YouTube before this."

Then there are the tags.  These are the words and phrases that help the search engine identify your video.  Use as many tags as possible - and use variants of common phrases.  If 'PR' is one of your tags, then make 'public relations' a tag as well.  Enter tags that transliterate common words differently, as 'Kyiv' and 'Kiev.'  The more tags, the more likely it is that viewers will find you.

YouTube also encourages users to set up pages containing all their clips.  These pages work much like Facebook and Vkontakty pages. 

And, because YouTube is a business, it offers paid, highly targeted advertising programs as well.     
We live in an era when anyone with a camera can make a video.  Add a computer running Microsoft Windows and Windows Movie Maker software, and an Internet connection, and you've got the basic requirements necessary to create and upload a the next viral clip.