8 tips to get people to watch your videos
You’ve decided to make a trailer for your game (or video demo, interview etc). You’ve spent hours putting together the video, trying to make it as good as possible. It’s fantastic, a true reflection of your game, a shining beacon of video greatness in a sea of YouTube bile. So why is it sitting there with under 100 views? Why is no one watching it? In this post we explore what you should be doing to get more eyeballs for your videos.
Hosting
There are two big players in the video hosting game; the goliath YouTube and the teeny Vimeo. Broadly speaking the service is identical EXCEPT Vimeo does not allow you to upload commercial content, which is a shame. So don’t bother. That said, YouTube is huge. With well over a billion page views EVERY DAY, it’s quite literally massive. It’s a great place to house your video content with potentially an audience of millions.
SEO
A large part of getting other people to find your video is how well it performs in search. Spend time writing a good title, description and tags to help make sure Google finds you. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, behind Google. And Google regularly pulls in videos from YouTube as part of its search results, anything you can do to encourage this will result in more views.
Placement
Where you put your video largely affects how many people can see it. If you hide it away in a poorly visited section on your site, no one will see it. If you put it in a blog post on your site, a few people will see it, until the next blog post pushes it from view. Be proud of your video. Give it its own space, preferably on the homepage. Make it stand out.
Tell people
“Friends, family, lend me your eyes.” it may not be as punchy as the original but it should help point out that unless you are telling people about your game then you are wasting an opportunity. I wrote, quite frankly, an amazing post on who to tell about your game. Go read it and replace the word game with video for an instant guide on who to tell about your video.
Share the link
Both YouTube and Vimeo will give you a specific URL to your video. It’s essential that you share that link with people. Not just friends and family as mentioned above, but the peoples of the Internet.
Incentivise
People love being rewarded for something, especially if that something is as easy as watching and sharing your video. You can tap into this by rewarding people for watching your video or when your video reaches a certain number of views. Discount codes, extended demos, new map packs, or even additional, secret, video content.
Spend some cash
You may be a small struggling indie, but one of the best ways to get people to watch your videos is to spend some cash on advertising. If you really want to get people to watch your video, and you can possibly share it, then try to put some money behind video adverts. YouTube offers quite a good rate, and you can make your money go further by cleverly targeting smaller niche groups.
Make it good
By far the most important thing to do is to make it good. No one wants to watch a crappy trailer, not even your mum.
There you have it. 8 tips for getting people to watch your video. What did we miss? What tips and tricks do you have to get more people watching your videos? Let us know in the comments.