Chris Anderson of TED Talk fame has compared its contribution to that of inventor and printer Johannes Guttenberg's towards bulk communication. From education to journalism, to advertisement, politics, social awareness or popular culture YouTube's influence is felt everywhere.
Starting your own YouTube channel is easy. Sign in to YouTube and click on the user icon at the top right of the screen. Click the gear icon to get into your account's YouTube Settings. Right at the bottom of your account information, you will see in small print, "Create a new channel". Click on it. Then choose a brand account name and click on Create and your channel is ready for you to load videos into.
Like in the movie, Secret Superstar, where a girl, wanting to make her songs heard and make money uploads her videos to YouTube, you, too, need to ask yourself why you are creating this channel and what is it going to be about. Remember, one video does not make a channel. Not even a few. You will need many and have to be consistent about it.
How do you get people to view your channel and subscribe to it? Making money is the next big hurdle. There are almost 500 videos uploaded every minute. Most of them get less than 500 views. Content is the sine qua nonof any channel, followed by good visual effect. Your content needs to be crisp and clear, authentic and creative. Don't copy; just be you. Make your audience relate to your subject so that they can talk about it and share with friends.
Don't worry, there is professional help at hand. Log in to YouTube Creators at www.youtube. com/yt/creators and take their tutorials to make your channel a success. Click on the Learn and Connect tab on the site to unlock the free courses.
Before you watch a movie, you see the trailer, right? Here too, you need to create attractive thumbnails to pull viewers. Thumbnails are the small images that you click on to look at your videos. You need a catchy line and an image that people can relate to so as to get more clicks. Since the image is small, the audio of the thumbnail has to be excellent. The video should be shot with a good camera. If you are using your mobile camera, then shoot in landscape mode. Above all, use a good editing tool like Premiere Pro.
To easily create thumbnails, go to Creator Studio at www. youtube.com/dashboard. Click on Video Manager. Next to the video, click on Edit. Click the Custom thumbnail button to the right of the preview screen. Upload a thumbnail. Once the thumbnail is uploaded, click Save changes.
You can also go to Canva and access their free tools to create YouTube thumbnails. Try it out at www.canva.com/en_in/create/youtube-thumbnails.
There is nothing like having a product you can go live with. If you go live for the first time, you have to enable your channel. First, confirm that your channel is verified and there are no restrictions. On the desktop, go to Creator Studio tools, and then go to the Live Streaming tab. On the YouTube app on mobile, create a live stream. Enabling a live stream for the first time may take up to 24 hours.
You may consider streaming your product using Facebook Live, Periscope or YouTube Live. Periscope is embedded in Twitter. If you use Periscope, you can send out a tweet each time you broadcast. And the added advantage is that people you don't know will read your tweets, thereby increasing your viewer base. The downside is that it can be streamed only through mobile devices.
YouTube is giving tough competition to Facebook Live and Periscope. They have introduced automatic live captioning. They have also started live chat replays that enable people watching the recorded live stream to see the comments that were made in real time.