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Youtube videos: guidelines

Our Youtube channel is one of our most important 'shop windows' for the world, so we're determined to make it as good as it can be.

If you have video content, we are going to ask you to follow a new set of video guidelines for use when uploading a video to YouTube or embedding it on bbk.ac.uk using our Plone content management system.

Keywords: critical to findability on the web

  • Keywords – namely, words that people use to search for content – are criticalto your Youtube title and description tag. Before you upload a video, try to think about the words/phrases people might use to search for content like yours. Use plain English (courses, not programmes) and don’t use jargon. If you’re stuck, all of the following are good keywords to use for Birkbeck:
    • courses, Master’s degrees, University of London

Advice on images

  • If you commission a video, try to ensure that you get a photo specifically to act as a ‘thumbnail’ for your video (this is like your Facebook profile picture), so that Youtube doesn’t just choose a random image from your video (inevitably, if you leave it to Youtube, the thumbnail will be very unflattering).
  • To provide better resolution, try to ensure that the person or whatever is the focus of your image is on the left half of the photo (otherwise, they won’t appear properly in our playlists).

Your video title

  • The most important part of your Youtube title is the first 66 characters (because this is what shows up in search). Therefore, you need to ‘front-load’ your title, to ensure the most important information is at the start of your title.
  • Once you decide on your keyword/keyword phrase, include it in the first 66 characters of your title.
  • Don’t include names in your title – unless your video is about someone importantand/or recognisable (Professor David Latchman; Professor Catharine Edwards would be worth name-checking, for example).
    • If you’re not sure whether they’re likely to be name-checked, just include the name in your video description and use your title for something better.
    • If you think they are recognisable enough, include them at the end of your title.
    • Do not include student names in your title, for data protection reasons.
    • Make sure your title doesn’t duplicate another title; otherwise, Google/Youtube might assume it’s the same video and won’t index it.

Your video description

  • You can use this field to include further detail about your video.
  • Your first line should contain the ‘selling point’ for your video – what’s so great about it? What questions is your video answering? And, critically, this line should only be 160 characters or less (as that’s what shows in search engine return pages).
  • After that, however, you can include more information about your video - sometimes people don't have time to watch videos, but they're happy to read descriptions, so make sure it's pretty self-explanatory.

Calls to action

  • All videos should have calls to action (i.e. suggestions about what to look at next):
  • You need to include a minimum of 2 calls to action for each video – ideally consisting of some text and a link on the Birkbeck website or a link to our blogs – e.g :
  • Try to ensure that the information you are linking to is likely to be on our site for a while (so don’t signpost an event on our events calendar, as the information comes off our site, once the event is over). Staff pages and course index pages are both good options.