There’s a feature in YouTube that not a lot of people know about. It’s called annotations, and with it, your viewers can actually interact with your videos.
For example, let’s say you want some text to popup in your video that says “Click Here For More Information”. With annotations, you can do that. And when the user clicks on that text, they can be taken to another video in YouTube that contains more information (they can’t be taken to another URL…only another video in YouTube).
Or say for example you sell clothes and you put together a video on YouTube that shows a few of your more popular items. You can draw annotation boxes around each individual item and when a user clicks on one, they can be taken to another video about that specific item.
I’ve put together a short tutorial that shows you had to add annotations to your YouTube videos. You can watch it below (please note the annotation feature in YouTube is still in beta, so it doesn’t always work perfectly):
And here’s a great example of annotations used in video marketing on YouTube. It’s a video by Samsung:
Hello Dave, I thought you were not a youtube person, good post, I was suprised “editorial and quality control is lost” looked at annotations the other day and I think the video has to be right for them dont just thrown in, for the sake of it.
Hey Sean – no, I’m not a big YouTube fan…but…the post was about YouTube so it was appropriate to have the video hosted there too. And most of the videos I do automatically get syndicated across multiple sharing sites, on iTunes, etc…including YouTube.
The bottom line was to show how video marketing is evolving, and my guess is that you’ll be seeing a lot of this video interactivity over the course of the next 12 months and beyond.
Dave,
That was an eye-opener, what a great, great way to put together a mini-serial. I grew up with the 30 minute style of Flash Gordon, Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid, Sky King, et al but to condense it down to a level like this really opens up the world of filmmaking. I live a few miles away from where these gems were shot for a reason. And I note that if you don’t chose the “Follow your Instinct” you end up at a dead end. Brilliant! Thanks so much for bringing this to our attention. I can see so many ways to use this….
Bert