YouTube shorts are basically YouTube versions of Instagram Reels or TikToks. But are YouTube shorts worth integrating into your content performance strategy or is they just yet another content type that will take even more time to produce content for?
Let's dive into the topic and see how YouTube shorts have worked for me.
What are YouTube shorts?
YouTube shorts are YouTube videos that are 60 seconds or less and are shot in the 9 x 16 format as opposed to the traditional YouTube format of 16 x 9.
So they look like this:
To publish a YouTube short, just make sure the video is shot in that format, under 60 seconds and add the hashtag #shorts in the title.
Do YouTube shorts perform?
I can't say that YouTube is one of my major platforms but I do live stream my podcast on my channel. Most of those episodes have just a handful of views at most. But my YouTube shorts have a ton of views. For example, a recent set of five videos had about 20,000 views. So something is working.
Certainly, there are some that don't perform at all but in the big picture of my YouTube content they perform fantastically well. They also have driven an increase in number of subscribers of my channel.
Now, I don't know if those subscribers will care about my live streams but they will also be notified of my next shorts.
How to create YouTube shorts
You can certainly create unique content for your YouTube strategy. That's one way to try it. You could also take up to 60-second snippets from your video podcasts or other video content and use that. Just make sure it's correctly formatted.
My daughter and I create these videos in the form of Instagram Reels. Those Reels are jumping on an audio trend. After we share them on Instagram we share them on YouTube as well.
I simply download them from the Instagram app. And then upload them using the YouTube app.
Once the video has been uploaded you can also go into the YouTube studio and add most of the features you can normally add including:
- Playlist links
- Video links
- Calls to action to subscribe
- Links to your website if you've been approved by YouTube to do that
Sometimes specific social media networks don't like when you use content from other networks. For example, when I use my Reels on TikTok they hardly ever perform. But for the time being it does seem to be a viable strategy for YouTube.
I also use these videos natively on Facebook, LinkedIn and sometimes Twitter so it is certainly a cog in the COPE strategy.
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