How to engage your audience with Youtube features

Hey, it's Shaun here with Blue Cow Creative. We're back with another YouTube video for you. Now, the last video, if you've been watching them in order, is about how to use Evernote. Now, you see that's on the screen right now, but that's not what I want to talk to you about. I want to talk to you about some of the the added features that's in YouTube. Now for many people, they're just uploading videos to YouTube. They may be putting a description and some tags in there, but they're not fully engaging the features that YouTube is making available to them. So one of the key things I want to show you here is when you have an account, you can go into your video manager, which is going to show you all your different videos that you have. And if you go in to edit the video, we're going to use this one because it's the most recent one that I've uploaded. The features you're going to notice across the top here, you've got Info and Settings, you've got Enhancements. Now we're not going to get into all of them, but basically you can do some quick fixes here. So fix some of the light, you can add different photo filters, some special effects, those kind of things like blurring faces. For audio, you can go in here, you can add some audio tracks that are available to you., which is great, especially if you don't have any video editing capabilities. But really the cool things that I like to use a lot of the times are things called annotations. Now this would allow you to do any of the following things. You can add speech bubbles, you can add notes to the screen, you can add titles. So for example, if you wanted to have at the end of the video— let's just go here to the video, I think it's near the very end. Get past this. So let's say I want to put on here text, and I want to say subscribe to our channel. That's what I wanted. I want to change the font, make it black so it stands out. I'm going to put it down here. And now the next thing that I want to do is I want to actually make that a link. So I'm going to go then add another annotation, which is a spotlight. You see this box? What you're going to do is you're going to drag this box over top of that text. You're going to choose link, and you're going to link it to subscribe. It says here, enter YouTube username. So for me, CowCreative. Now what's going to happen is once you save all this and the video plays, When it gets to that point of the video, the text is going to pop up just like this, boom, and the link would be active. So if people clicked on that, it would subscribe them to your channel. That's one of the key things you want to do is you want to make sure that you're building that audience and you're keeping people engaged. Now one of the other things, I'm just going to go ahead and delete this because we don't actually want those in there. That, and we're going to delete this. If you're going to notice across the top, we've got a button called Cards. Now, Cards are a new feature of YouTube, and these are really great because it allows you to go add a card. And one of the key ones is an associated website. So we're going to go ahead and create this. Now, there are some steps if you go to the settings where you have to authorize your account and put in the address that you want. So for us, we've put in our website We're going to go yes and it comes up here and what do you want it to show up. We're going to go visit my website and I want to put click or please click here. I can choose any of the images that are on the website. I like to use my face because that's what people will click on, faces. We're going to go create card. Now what's going to happen is you see here, this shows up at the top. It says please click here. Now when people click on it, you get a pop-out, a card pop-out, which then allows people to click and visit and go to your website. So you're further building that engagement with YouTube to build your network and market beyond the video. So using cards is a great way to do that. Some of the other features would be fundraising, encouraging people to contribute to a project, selling a product so you have merchandise for sale, or promote another video or playlist. So if you've got a series of videos, you can have this pop up appeal to people at certain points in the video to take them to other videos that you've created. So these are some great features within YouTube. One of the last things that are in here would be subtitles and closed captioning. So you can set which language. For example, if we want in English, and we could go set language. Now what it's going to do is— let's see if it's going to work for me here. Let's get to the actual video. It may not at this point because I think we have to turn it on. Subtitles. There we go. As you see, subtitles are on the bottom. Now what it's doing is it's listening to my voice of what I'm saying in the video and it's converting it to actual subtitles. This is really great, a really great feature for you to have in your video. That's YouTube and all the additional features that are on there. Thanks for watching. We're going to have more great videos as the time comes on. As the time goes forward. So please click on the link on the screen, subscribe to our channel. We'd be happy to help you promote and grow your business together. Again, I'm Shaun with Blue Cow Creative. Thanks for watching.