I think having a YouTube channel, for a University, is an absolute necessity. But how to you know if you’re doing it right? Obviously, like any other channel you need to be paying attention to your stats and engaging your audience, but what about your meta data? Well  I recently came across a great tool that grades all the videos on your YouTube channel. Pixability’s online video grader, is great because it gives you in depth analysis of a wide range of categories telling you not only where you need to improve but also how each category is evaluated. For example our channel’s average description length is 28 words, however a description of 100 words or more gets you ranked better. Time to add some text to our current videos and adjust our upload template. It’s possible that some of this data is imprecise because I believe they are getting data from unlisted videos as well but it’s still helpful to give you a barometer of success.
The tool also analyzes video on your main site as well and, I think unfairly, penalizes you for not having video on your homepage. Even Hulu, a premier video site doesn’t have a video on their homepage (and in fact the YU YouTube channel scored higher than Hulu on this tool).
All in all this might not be a 100% accurate portrayal of the quality of your video efforts, but I think it gives you a strong understanding of the categories that you should be keeping in mind and how to improve across the board. Definitely worth checking out.
Tags: marketing, social media, video, youtube