Episode 3: YouTube Yourself to Stardom
We spoke with Meghan McKeighen, founder of Fenix Social Media, to get some pro tips on managing your YouTube channel. Meghan is one of the premier social media experts in Nashville, TN. She manages the social accounts for many of Nashville's music festivals and some of the biggest names in Las Vegas. She built her business from the ground up and has spent over 10 years mastering the social media arena.
Q: Video for any industry is really important, but for real estate it seems to be essential. How should a real estate agent use the power of YouTube to attract home buyers and home sellers?
Meghan:
YouTube is owned by Google, therefore it is "Google crawled" meaning it's awesome for your business in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).Think about your video titles as the best place for taking advantage of that. Produce videos on topics interesting to your potential customers, tips on home buying, maybe offer a 'day in the life' of your job as an agent to show them all the work that goes into the process, consider digital tours of available listings or new developments, interview colleagues/partners you use and recommend like homeowners insurance, mortgage brokers, home inspectors, etc. interesting videos on questions customers might have will lead back to you.
Q: What are the best practices for a YouTube channel?
Meghan:
- Organize your channel and customize it with your branding and photo
- Write descriptive titles and Google search YouTube SEO to make sure you are checking off all the SEO best practices available to you
- Only upload content you’re proud of - meaning well-lit, decent audio, not super shaky, etc.
- Consider buying a smartphone gimbal on Amazon for anywhere from $75-200. These will give a steady feel to your videos made on your phone and allow you to turn the phone towards you and give yourself a better composition when filming yourself on the go like a vlogger
- Manage your content - check back for comments and respond to actual people and delete any inappropriate comments
Q: Can you quickly explain the benefits of creating playlists on your YouTube channel?
Meghan:
Creating sub-categorized playlists can greatly boost user engagement. Each playlist should be relevant to your business with four to six videos per playlist. It also makes it easy to share multiple videos at one time, by sharing a link to the playlist instead of to one video. Playlists are really cool to make private video libraries for clients or potential clients!
Q: How should you optimize a video description?
Meghan:
Keywords and keyword phrases should correspond with:
a) whatever describes your video accurately, and
b) the words and phrases that users enter in search engines to find content like yours.
Keep in mind: search engines have wizened up to keyword-stuffing, the practice of overusing keywords and variations of keywords to try to hack the system. Don’t bother with that. Write for humans, not robots, or else you may get penalized.
Q: What are some tricks to get subscribers?
Meghan:
Ask! At the end of your video, or even in the beginning, ask users to subscribe if they like the content they see and want to make sure they don’t miss updates from you. Utilize the “subscribe” button they can be added to all videos.
Responding to commenters also helps to gain followers. Add a branding watermark to your videos which let viewers subscribe to your channel inside of your video. A cool trick is putting a YouTube subscribe button image there INSTEAD of your actual logo.
We hope you enjoyed this interview with Meghan. Make sure you stay tuned to next week's Momentum Makers where we chat about Twitter. If you would like to hire Meghan and her team at Fenix Social Media for social media coaching and consulting, click here!
