YouTube reaches its 10th birthday in 2015, but it’s kind of hard to remember a time when it wasn’t around. The statistics are staggering: Every month more than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube and watch more than 6 billion hours of video. Every minute, users upload more than 100 hours of video. The site makes bucketloads of money for Google with ad revenue. YouTube stars appear out of nowhere, uploading videos from their basements and becoming viral sensations.
YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine (behind you-know-what), and maintaining a hearty YouTube channel is a great way for businesses to stand out. For a researcher or presenter, YouTube is also a perfect resource.
YouTube Video Tools
One of the super-secret YouTube features is the ability to edit the heck out of your videos inside the site itself. When you hit the button to edit a video, you can not only change the name and tags but also the video itself.
YouTube Enhancements Options
- Apply quick fixes such as stabilization and auto-fix presets to clean up a video in a flash.
- The Filters tab lets you apply color tones over your video.
- Worried about lawsuits? The Special Effects tab will attempt to blur the faces of everyone in your video.
- If you’re really ambitious, you can combine multiple videos, change audio and do all kinds of fancy things in the full YouTube Video Editor.
Nerd Know-How: Add Background Music to Your Videos
The Audio tab reveals thousands of royalty-free songs you can use as background music for your video. Just choose one and set the volume level to play over your video.
Annotations
Another awesome way to add a little something extra to your YouTube videos is with the Annotations feature. Here’s where you can add little screen popups that tell your audience about other videos they might like and more. You can program when and where each annotation will pop up.
Ok, so the digital elephant in the room is that everyone hates popups, right? Why would we put them on our own videos? Well, if you use them correctly and don’t get too obnoxious, they can help your viewers find more information they might want and need (or maybe you can make cute facts come up – like VH1 Pop Up Videos – I can watch those for hours!).
Branding
One of the reasons that some businesses may shy away from developing a YouTube Channel is that our home-baked videos look, well, home baked. They lack that fancy branding and cool touch of a professionally produced video. But in 2014, YouTube snuck in some amazing branding tools to help anyone’s YouTube video look more polished.
The secret branding sauce is a little hard to find. Look for it under Channel options in InVideo Programming. There you’ll find options to add a watermark, to promote additional videos automatically and, best of all, to add a cool 3-second intro automatically to all your existing videos.
Nerd Know-How: Create Professional YouTube Intros
When you make your 3-second video, make the last umpteenth of the video a blank screen so that there’s a smidgeon of a pause before the main video starts. Want a professional intro without going to design school? Fiverr has a ton of them!
Captions
YouTube can automatically add closed captions to your videos, but be aware that their first draft is going to suck. The good news is that you can quickly edit the computer-generated translations line by line. Bonus! You can grab the captions and clean them up to turn a YouTube video into a blog post.
