How to Use YouTube Annotations for Marketing Purposes

YouTube is the king of video content on the web. The powerful and easy to use interface gives users many options when it comes to customizing and sharing their videos. Most of these features can be used to help market your company’s video content to a wider and more relevant audience. YouTube’s annotations allows for user friendly customization of any of your uploaded videos.

YouTube Annotations

YouTube annotations act as a way to add additional commentary to your to the videos that you upload onto your channel. Before discussing the ways you can market your videos more effectively through annotations, lets discuss the various types of annotations a user can add to their very own videos once their uploaded to YouTube. There are 5 different types of YouTube annotations you can add to your videos. Each option allows for different kinds of customizations to your videos, dependent on what you’re trying to share with your video’s viewers. Everything from what type of font, link and colors to display is up to you to customize.

The 5 Types of YouTube Annotations & How They Can Help Market

1. The Speech Bubble: This annotation acts as way of adding additional text not supplied in the video, but is still important that the user be aware of it. For instance, adding a speech bubble to someone who is talking during a video is an easy way to add additional content to what they’re already discussing. For a marketer this annotation can be especially helpful because it not only allows you to display text, but also add a link to another YouTube video, YouTube playlist, YouTube channel, a subscribe to your YouTube channel function, a compose a message function, a video response upload and a YouTube search query. These functions can drastically help market your brand’s presence in YouTube by quickly and easily connecting users to your other content available through your channel and on the YouTube network.

2. The Note: In my opinion this is the most usable annotation of them all. It’s a simple square that you can enter text into, as well as the same type of links to other YouTube features like the speech bubble allows you to add. This annotation looks a lot more professional and is easier way to present links to relevant destinations like a brand’s Twitter account or main website. A marketer could utilize this annotation in a similar way to the speech bubble, but with a greater sense of professionalism than a random speech bubble popping up mid-video.

3. The Title: This annotation acts simply as an added function for videos without a title built into the production of the video. Users can customize the color, font and size of the title box they wish to have for their entire video or if they wish to cut their video in various sections with various subtitles. This annotation is more helpful for branding purposes because it merely helps clarify for the user what the video is and what company is being represented.

4. The Spotlight: The spotlight annotation acts similarly to the note annotation in that it allows you to link to various aspects of the YouTube network, but the only difference is it highlights a section of the video above the text or link you’ve added. This is helpful to marketers because it highlights a certain aspect of the video, adding a relevant link or snippet of text below the emphasized section. By placing the spotlight over a particular item within your video that section now acts a working link to other content. This is helpful for marketers because its meant to help maximize subscriptions to your YouTube channel and views to the rest of your available videos. Annotations are extremely helpful in increasing user engagement with the rest of your YouTube content.

Here’s a wonderful example of how to use YouTube annotations to help further the marketing of your video content:

5. The Pause: The pause function freezes the video during a period of time of your choosing, then resumes the video once that pause time is over. This annotation is helpful to marketers to help emphasis a particular part of a video that may be beneficial for viewers to focus on for a longer moment than the video allows. For instance, a user with a video with important contact information about a particular product or service may choose to give viewers more time to take down this information. This annotation would appear to be used the least, just by the nature of what it does. However, it’s still useful to highlight an important message or image about your company to consumers, so vital that the video needs a brief pause.