When it comes to social media, many of the traditional, or more formal methods, ways of presenting information are not suitable for social media platform. Traditional philatelists face challenges in adapting to the new way of engagement.
This How To addresses some common irritants. While not comprehensive, it will cover the basic errors I have seen over the last six or so years and is designed to educate new entrants to one of the fastest growing social media platforms for philatelists.
Key Information
The main aim of YouTube is to get promotion and monetisation by working with the YouTube algorithm. This algorithm is not set in stone and constantly changes.
For philatelic organisations, your key outcomes should be:
- Promotion of your organisation to boost membership.
- Monetisation of your channel to replace other declining income streams, or to reduce current membership fees.
For non-philatelic organisations, YouTube allows you to share you love of the hobby and hopefully self-fund your stamp collection through monetisation.
About Sections
Your About section is like your own mini profile. However, many, many, many of these are left blank. This section should contain info about who you are (like a name), your collecting interests or intent, and links to your other social media platforms.
Video Length
The ideal best length for a video is between six to ten minutes. However, most videos range between five to 15 minutes. If you are growing your audience, it is recommended that videos be about three minutes in length to start with.
Videos outside these lengths are less likely to be watched. Consider editing out all the pre-presentation information (Is everyone one here? How are you doing? When is the next meeting? etc) at the beginning and end of the videos. There are lots of free software options available to make the snip!
Also consider editing long presentations into multiple videos to make specific content easier to find.
Video Titles
One of the problems traditional philately brings to social media is adding long titles that are more consistent with formal papers, journal articles or other specialised publications.
For the best Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) results, the character length should not exceed 65-70 characters. Titles with more characters beyond this will inhibit the user from finding your content. The title should contain the key words at the beginning of the title to help promote the channel with similar key metadata. YouTube uses metadata to decide what the video is about, which videos or categories it’s related to, and who might want to watch it.
Below is an example of a Stanley Gibbons video title:
£ 5 vs £ 500,000? Worth It: The Value of the Penny Red | Stanley Gibbons
In this example, the key word here is Penny Red. This is because a philatelic audience would be more likely to search for Penny Red than £5. However, the keyword is further in the description making it less likely to show in search results.
There is also no need to include ‘Stanley Gibbons’ as the channel is already named Stanley Gibbons, and if someone searches Stanley Gibbons, YouTube will highlight the channel.
To get better results, the title could be written as:
Penny Red Values: £ 5 vs £ 500,000
or
Stamps: Penny Red Values – £ 5 vs £ 500,000
or
Penny Red Values – Determining the Value
Another example is from the Royal Philatelic Society of Victoria:
RPSV PHILATELIC MEETING 2021 04 29 MALCOLM GROOM TASMANIAN EMBOSSED EVELOPES 1883-1912
In this example, the key words here are Tasmanian Embossed Envelopes. Nearly all other words are irrelevant. Acronyms and abbreviations should be avoided. Names of presenters should be recorded in the description field only unless they are global celebrities with a million followers (Madonna’s collection of Tasmanian Embossed Envelopes). Only one word should use captials and all other words should be capitalised.
To get better results, the title could be written as:
Philately – Tasmanian Embossed Envelopes
Video Descriptions
One of the most important ranking factors for YouTube SEO is the video description. Many, many of these are left blank. You should try to keep descriptions brief and to the point and should not exceed 150-157 characters in length. The immediate second sentence should be a link sending viewers back to your website.
The video 6.2 Magic of the Maharajah – Piyush Khaitan by the India Study Circle contains no description at all. In addition, the title is so generic, YouTube will have difficulty recommending or promoting the channel in its search results or to the right audience. For example, this video would more likely be promoted to someone searching ‘Magic’ rather than ‘Stamps.’
The first few lines of the description should outline what the video is about.
Here is an example from Exploring Stamps (Illegal Chagos Stamps Explained: #philately 19th):
Let’s take a look at the recent stamp news from the Chagos Islands, why the UPU has declared that any British stamps from these islands will be illegal!
This description clearly outlines the keywords ‘stamp news,’ ‘Chagos Islands,’ British Stamps’ and ‘illegal’. This will perform better in SEO.
Alternatively, this could be improved a little by moving a few words forward:
British Stamps from Chagos Islands have been declared illegal by the UPU and have made stamp news.
Here is another example from the Royal Philatelic Society of London ( RPSL 7th September 2021: The Navigators – Australia High Values 1963-1974 by Jonas Hällström RDP):
This is a recording of the presentation, given to an international audience live using Zoom video conferencing, by Jonas Hällström RDP FRPSL, at a meeting of the Royal Philatelic Society London on September 7th 2021. Jonas presented a traditional class display relating to the high value Navigators stamps used by the Commonwealth of Australia in the period 1963-1974. Jonas explained how the set of 6 stamps, issued when Australia was using pounds, shillings, and pence, were re-issued as decimal stamps when Australia transitioned to using dollars and cents. The stamps, featuring men who had undertaken expeditions to explore and chart the coasts of Australia, were high value stamps, intended primarily for use on heavier and larger items of post.
When a viewer searches results, all they see is this:
This is a recording of the presentation, given to an international audience live using Zoom video conferencing, by Jonas Hällström …
As you can see, it tells the viewer nothing and is less likely to be watched or promoted.
Descriptions are also great for including links to social media or to support documents. Mi Oficina is one of the only channels that regularly includes a link to a PDF document of the items shown in a presentation. Many philatelic organisations do not include a link to their social media platforms and this is a great waste of free promotional activity!
Hashtags (#) can also help link like content by channel creators, although they do not little for SEO. Do not overuse hashtags – keep them to a bare minimum. They are best used for trending topics or content.
Like, Subscribe, Notifications
To retain viewers on YouTube, it is important to remind them to like the channel, subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell to be alerted when new content is uploaded. These actions also help with promoting content through the YouTube algorithm.
Many channels fail to do this. I recommend at the start and end of your video, remind viewers to do all three actions.
Example: “If you like this video, hit the like button and subscribed today. And don’t forget to click the notification button so you know when I upload new content!”
Comments
Quite a few channels have their comments section turned off. From my experience, these channels are usually organised philatelic channels and they have an old perception that comments are bad (back from the old phpBB forum days in the 1990s).
However, comments are important to understanding what your viewers like and don’t like, and also to create engagement.
The only exception to this rule is where the video contains minors (13yrs and under). YouTube does not allow comments generally to protect the minor from predatorial and bullying viewers.
If your comments are turned off – go turn them on now!
Follow Me!
Just added chapters to my latest video
This is all excellent advice. I’m right now in the process of working on my presentations to see how I can improve on my various channels, and will put some if not all of this into effect as it applies to my content.
It’s important we all remember, in my opinion, that our audience should at least partly be non-self identifying philatelists, but stamp collectors. Even the “I kinda like stamps” crowd.
One thing I’m hearing from YouTube marketers is that the “please subscribe etc” at the beginning should be either very brief or absent. It’s better, “they” say, to do it at the end or at some point in the middle. It can turn people off if you spend even ten seconds on it right away.
I’ve also learned that Chapters are going to be imposed on longer videos. I’m not sure how to do it yet in my software, but am seeing advice to insert your own chapters & name appropriately, so the algorithm doesn’t do it for you. You can then list the chapters in the description for viewers to skip to what they need from your video. Chapters like Intro, Welcome, Speaker Introduction, etc. This can also help people returning to a longer video to finish watching.
The chapter titles will be partially used to find content.
Keep up the always excellent work!
I agree with the subscribe stuff you mention. Nothing worse than spending the first 5 min of a video with sponsorship or ads. The problem with it being at the end is the assumption that viewers watch all the way to the end. I think having it in the middle would be awkward. Introducing briefly at the beginning and cementing it at the end is best (IMO). Just like asking people a question to respond to in comments.
With chapters, this would only be beneficial to the organisations that post 1hr meeting videos. I don’t see enough non-organisational creators posting content that long. Also, viewers love ‘part 1/2/3’ videos as well.
Chapters are easy I started using them about a month ago and love the feature both as a creator and as a viewer. Nearly all my recent videos have chapters, date a look at the description of the videos to see how to set it up
Essentially just make a timestamped list of chapters starting with 0:00 for the introduction.
I think you need to have at least 3 or 4 chapters and there is a minimum chapter duration but it’s very small I think I have some chapters under 20 seconds.
Chapters can really help with Google Search.
Aside from chapters the only thing in the original post I don’t subscribe to is minimalist descriptions, from everything I have studied, robust descriptions are ideal and help seach algorithms better understand your content. That said don’t add unrelated content or spam keywords or click bait. Do however find additional creative but accurate ways to describe your content. For example I may use stamps, collectable stamps, postage stamps, stamp collection, stamp collector, philatilist, philately, and philatelic material all in context in the description. Instead of repeating the single word stamp or collector repeatedly.
Great topic always keep to discuss in more detail!
Probably the better word for the descriptions is ‘concise’ – which aligns with what you are saying. 🙂