Did you know that YouTube is the second most popular social networking site with more than 1 billion monthly users? 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and it has become a primary source of entertainment in the past 16 years since it was founded. These days, businesses are looking to YouTube as a source of content creation and digital marketing. To be honest, I use YouTube a lot for my work, too. I create and upload videos to our company’s owned media’s YouTube channel where I film, edit, and sometimes star in our weekly videos. This has made me interested in creating videos for my very own website!
The website I created, Ono’s Oahu, is a source for all things food in Hawaii. I decided it will mostly be about food recommendations around the island. To accompany that, I decided my YouTube channel will feature video reviews and recommendations for Hawaii restaurants and cafes. Now that I started a YouTube channel and released my first video below, how can I make sure that I am creating a great video while keeping the food/restaurant theme in mind?
To start, I researched what makes a great YouTube video in general. Of course, having the right equipment to make high-quality videos would be preferred. However, it’s all about increasing your brand awareness and grabbing the audience’s attention. An attention-grabbing intro is a nice start to making a great YouTube video. The video I uploaded is short, but I tried to pack it in with as much information as possible within two minutes. I created an introduction that not only informed the viewer what my business is about but showed clips of what the general viewer would be interested in (food). You should also keep the intro short as attention spans are short. Therefore, I tried doing this with my intro as well (with it being 10 seconds).
Another element that makes a great YouTube video would be incorporating background music. If there is music involved, it not only grabs the attention of your viewer but it sets the mood of your video. My video included background music. I tried to choose a song that was upbeat and catchy while not taking away too much focus from the main message.
Developing videos as a series is another good tip. If your content performs well on one video, making it a series will increase the chances of more views on your series as a whole. You can also create a playlist so it could be someone’s very own binge-watching material. Because my channel is all about food in Hawaii, I thought I would start with restaurants/cafes in one area and eventually make it into a series (hence the title of my video being “Kailua Favorites”).
One last element that makes a great YouTube video would be to design an eye-catching video thumbnail. Thumbnails are the first thing a viewer sees on your YouTube channel and it needs to stand out for someone to click while they’re browsing or looking for other suggested videos. I used Pixlr to create my thumbnail and tried to incorporate bright and bold text as well as multiple images to get the viewer to click.
Now that we’ve talked about what makes a Youtube video great, we can now look into the specifics of a food YouTube video. Food is one genre that is very popular on YouTube with so many different types of content. Many successful food YouTubers range in content, from sharing recipes to taste tests to grocery hauls. Local focus would be my niche when it comes to the food content I would be creating. Local focus is featuring content that appeals to travelers looking to visit your area. Therefore, if people who visit Hawaii or even Hawaii residents come across my channel, they can get new ideas on what foods they are interested in trying and where they want to go next.
I wanted to leave off with a food YouTuber that I’ve been watching recently. The channel, Feed Meimei, has over 170,000 YouTube subscribers, and she posts all about food. She lives in the Bay Area, so she also has a local focus in her themes where she tries various places in her area. She has developed a series where she “tries every ____ in ____” such as “trying every boba shop in San Francisco,” which has done well, so she has been able to create more videos with different types of foods in different places. Her thumbnails are eye-catching and explain the basic premise in one photo. She also has background music and a short intro in all of her videos.
Creating YouTube content is not an easy feat. However, following these small and simple tips can start you off in the right direction in creating good video content for your business.
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