A couple of days ago, I was poking around in my library’s YouTube account – generally tidying up the place, adding some info to video descriptions, etc (more on that in a future post perhaps). While doing that, I started looking at our YouTube Insights (that’s what YouTube calls statistics or analytics), and discovered some neat stuff.
And I thought I’d share. The stats are from Jan 1 , 2011- Oct 23, 2011). I created four “Big Insights” that I noticed, and each insight has a Takeaway. See if you can add some takeaways or insights to my list!
Big insight #1: Most people watching our videos are coming directly from YouTube.
- 32,929 from youtube – almost 70%
- embedded player – 8657 – 18%
- mobile devices – 5223 – 10.9%
- youtube channel page – 985 – 2%
Takeaway: Youtube is its own community. If we want to grow engagement (ie., get more comments, video views, likes, etc), we need to start interacting there. Only 18% of our total video views come from the “embedded player” – which means people watching our videos from the library’s website.
Big Insight #2: Tags are really important!
Links followed to this video – 28% (13,471). This means that someone was watching a video in Youtube, glanced over at the Related Videos sidebar, and clicked on one of our videos.
Takeaway: fill up the Tags box for each Youtube video (found on the Video Information page), and use very descriptive Keywords. Doing this will help your videos be found.
Big Insight #3: Post videos about what you do.
Most viewed videos for that time range:
- 60 second book review – meditations for women
- interview with a photographer
- local history info
- our really old mysteries of the book depository
- The mayor playing his guitar for our Air Guitar event
- rhyme and bounce, a toddler/baby video
Takeaway: See any similarities with these videos? Me neither. The one similarity is this: all those videos focus, in one way or antoher, on our stuff. So the takeaway here (besides making good, short, watchable videos) is to consistently share what your library does via video. If you can set up a regular schedule, that’s even better.
Big Insight #4: Community exists on Youtube!
Our video viewer demographics:
- 51% male, 49% female
- largest age range segments – 35-44, 45-54, 55-64
- Sharing, ratings, comments, favorites – all very low, even though we have 190 subscribers and 188,140 lifetime video views (since March 6, 2007).
Takeaway #1: Our videos are appealing to adults, so we should consider that as we continue making videos.
Takeaway #2: People are there – in Youtube – watching our videos. We need to start answering comments consistently, subscribing to other local organizations channels, and grow our community base in Youtube (if we want interaction, video views, and sharing of our videos).
What’s my ultimate point here? Use your Youtube insights – there’s some great information there. And start interacting with your Youtube community.
Oh, and make videos, too – that helps 
image by ukberri
For those of you that edit video on a Mac … Final Cut Pro X is VERY different from the old Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express. Interestingly enough, the new Final Cut operates a bit more like the simple iMovie, but has some very powerful features, too. Apple is attempting the best of both worlds – simplicity and powerful features. Have they pulled it off? Beats me – do a search for articles about the software, and you will find a mixture of love/hate articles on it!
Are you using video to connect with your customers? If not … Guess what? These days, most of your customers are used to connecting to people, to ideas, and to stories through video.
