1. Create and Customise Your Channel
Customising your channel is well worth the time it will take to set it up. You should add your company's branding, customise the colours to compliment your company's look, and add relevant information and links
2. Add Subtitles
Since March 2010 auto-captioning has been available to all YouTube users, so there's no technical excuse not to. Doing so adds captions for the hundreds of millions of hearing impaired people across the world, ensuring your content is accessible to anyone who'd like to watch it.
3. Don't Overuse Annotations
A so called ‘improvement’ from YouTube is the ability to add comments that display over the top of your footage. Don't be tempted to use this; the annotations look unprofessional, distract viewers and depending how overused they are, can be downright annoying.
4. Act to Remove Offensive Comments
Whilst you can't stop idiots from adding nasty comments to your videos or channel, you do have the power to delete the worst offenders. This doesn’t mean removing any negative or critical comments, but you can certainly remove any spam or comments that use offensive language. If you're getting seriously spammed or abused by a particular person, you can block that user as a last resort.
5. Engage With the YouTube Community
As a social platform, be sure you check out other content on the site and make suitable YouTube ‘friends.’ Look at content or channels that cover your local area or that are for a good cause that you/your company support. As well as engaging with other users, be sure to keep up to date with YouTube's own news as the site goes through some fairly major changes from time to time.
6. Organise Your Content
Be sure to organise your content to be viewer-friendly rather than just offer a linear stream of video uploads. Create playlists to group relevant videos together, or lump older content into time-related folders.
7. Don't Overlook Tags
As with many other sites, YouTube's content is organised on a tag word basis. It's more than worth taking the time to add the correct tags to your videos. Really try and brainstorm around the tags you're adding. For example, if your company offers dog products add "puppy," "pooch," "mutt," "hound," etc, too.
8. Promote Your YouTube Videos Elsewhere
Don't assume viewers will come to you, or automatically think to look you up on YouTube. Every time you post a video that's relevant for general sharing, blog about it, tweet it or add it to your Facebook Page. In addition, don't shy away from allowing embedding of your videos on other sites -- the more views the better.
9. Use YouTube's Free Analytics Tools
YouTube offers every user free analytics data via the "Insight" button on every uploaded video. This free-to-view info should not be overlooked as it can offer you some valuable info on not only views stats, but demographics, community, and the information on how users came across your video, including the popular links they followed to get there.
10. Don't Neglect Your Channel
If you're looking to go down the YouTube route then don't let your resolve or enthusiasm for the service dwindle a couple of months in. Even if you have no new content to post, still keep logging in to stay on top of comments, friend requests, add favourites, etc.
