Monday 25 June 2012

Don't Make this Mistake when Embedding YouTube Videos

How YouTube's "related videos" Feature can Hurt your Marketing

photo by Alan Light on Flickr
Many businesses are now using YouTube for promotional and educational videos to showcase what their business can do. They are a great way of reaching out to potential customers and getting your message across.

However, one of the useful features YouTube offers can, in some circumstances, really hurt you. Once your video has stopped playing, YouTube helpfully displays a collection of related videos, which the viewer might be interested in. Chances are, these will be determined using keywords in the title of your video. Some of them might even be videos you've uploaded yourself.

However, sometimes they aren't, and they might even put out a message completely different to the one that you are. Here are a few examples:

  • A kindergarten promotional video where the suggestions are less "child-friendly".
  • A company video where one of the suggestions is a competitor in the same market.
  • A company video where one of the suggestions may criticise the company or its products, or its market generally.

Obviously these are situations you want to avoid, and although you can't stop people searching for other material about you, your products, or your marketplace, you can at least stop YouTube from doing the work for them. Here's how.

When you embed a YouTube video, you'll always have a URL to work with, here's one for a video about LinkedIn. Play it, and look out for the (possibly) related items at the end.



The URL for this embedded video is as follows, click on the link and the video will open in a new window in your browser.


These can be suppressed simply by adding a few characters to the end of the URL. This is the same video, but if you play this one, you'll see that at the end, there is just a blank screen rather than the related videos.



As you can see, the URL is very similar, but just has a bit extra in it


This simple change will make sure that you market your business and its products - and nothing else!

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