YouTube is Albion College’s primary video hosting and sharing platform. It’s ease-of-use, channel creation options, and in-depth analytics make it a useful tool.
The College uses YouTube to host videos for embedding on the website, sharing in other social media sites, and marketing promotions in email and other campaigns (think of it as an “upload once, post everywhere” solution).
We post all videos to YouTube: athletics, academics, news stories, marketing pieces, event highlights -- everything.
Playlists
YouTube allows the creation of channels. We organize these channels into major themes: athletics, student life, academics, events, etc. As new videos are uploaded to YouTube, we add them to the respective playlist.
Tags, Headlines and Descriptions
To help with search engine optimization (SEO), “Albion College” should always appear in the video title, followed by a description of what’s in the video. Usually it’s descriptive, such as “Homecoming Highlights 20XX.”
For descriptions, shorter is better. If it’s promoting a particular department or promotion, we include a link back to the albion.edu website. We also try to list any individuals who appear in the video. If royalty free music is used in the video, we include the artist, title of the song, and link to the artist’s website.
Albion’s YouTube account is set to automatically include tags relating to the College, but others should be added that fit the context of the video. This also helps with SEO.
Video Preview
YouTube automatically creates a video preview screenshot for each video uploaded, but often the three default choices are unflattering or blurry. It's best to take a good screenshot of the video, representing a true preview of the video (often someone's face, or the title screen of the video), and upload that as a custom preview.
For good at-a-glance "video shopping," we will often create a custom preview using a photo from the video shoot and a title -- usually created in photo shop to HD specifications (1280x720).
Key Takeaways for Albion's YouTube Presence