YouTube: Platform Features

1. Insight

You wouldn’t judge your website’s performance by traffic alone, so why judge your video just by views? Insight, YouTube’s video analytics tool, measures views by date, tells you where users are finding your video (related search, embedded player, YouTube search, “viral”), and even gives you an “audience attention” score. 

2. Annotations

We see the future of online video in its potential for interactivity—video comments, mash-ups, user generated tagging, and so forth. Using its Annotations tools, YouTube allows you to add text notes and bubbles, links to other YouTube videos or channels, and highlighted areas. The Ad Council’s “That’s Not Cool” campaign used Annotations best with its interactive video quiz.

3. Favorite related videos

If your organization doesn’t have a lot of its own videos, you can still have an effective YouTube channel. Find videos that speak to your issues and favorite them. Favorited videos will show up on your channel page and provide your viewers with relevant content and demonstrate you’re a good participant in the community.

4. Closed captioning

For organizations that work within the international community or who cater to those with disabilities, video poses a challenge. With YouTube’s editing tools, you can add captions and subtitles right in the player.

5. Upload by phone

Now that the iPhone allows you to record video on your phone, you can upload video to YouTube directly from your mobile device. This opens up opportunities for organizations dealing with disaster relief or human rights, or those who want to give sneak peaks from a special event.

6. Skip to a specific time in the video

Have you ever wanted to direct someone to a very specific moment in a video? Maybe it’s a long video and your viewer only needs to see one part of it. Or different constituents will find different parts of the video most interesting. Well, you can do that by adding #t=2m25s to the end of the video URL, where “2m25s” represents 2 minutes and 25 seconds into the video. You can replace this with whatever timestamp you need.

7. Autoshare Options

With so many social networks out there, updating them all can take a significant amount of time. By enabling Autoshare on your YouTube account, your uploads, favorites, and ratings will automatically post to your Facebook, Twitter, or Google Reader account.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of YouTube

ADVANTAGES OF YOUTUBE

1. Free to use

Uploading and watching videos on YouTube is completely free. This gives you the opportunity to experiment and find out whether it works for you or not without worrying about the costs.

2. Gives you the opportunity to earn money through your videos

To earn money through your videos, you will have to have a Google AdSense account. Aside through Google AdSense, there are different ways you can earn money through YouTube. This can be done through:

• Affiliate Links
• Sponsorships
• Merch and Products
• Selling Digital Products
• Offer Services
• and much more

3. Easy to use

YouTube is easy to use for everyone, even if you don’t have any computer skills. Still, don’t know how to use this social media platform? Don’t worry, there are many tutorials out there to show you how to upload a video and much more.

4. An easy way to share information

With YouTube, you can share a good amount of information to a lot of people in a short time. You can also share information in an entertaining way. This can be in the form of:

• Videos
• Music
• Comedy Sketch
• Video Animation

5. Backlink are generated

YouTube can help boost your SEO by creating backlinks. These backlinks can be created when adding your website link onto your profile page and/or within the descriptions of each video you post on your channel. By having your website link see throughout different areas of your channel, this will get the word out about your website, which will, therefore, increase the traffic to it. 

DISADVANTAGES

1. Everything is public

YouTube is a public social media platform. This means people don’t need to create an account to see any of your videos you publish on your channels. Also, anyone can post a video. This can cause copyright issues, and there could be issues with privacy invasion.

2. Many rules

Like any other social media platform, YouTube has many rules which restrict what you can do within your channel. This can be through terms of optimisation, what things you can post on your channel and how your channel looks.

3. Your account can be disabled without any reason

If you are in breach of the rules YouTube has, your account can be disabled. This can occur if:

• The content you are publishing is in breach of the Terms of Service and Community Guidelines that you need to agree to create a YouTube Channel;
• You continue to act in predatory behaviour towards other people. Examples of this behaviour are harassment, sexual comments, and spam;
• Your videos are repeatedly reported for claims of copyright infringement;
• Your account can be disabled when copying someone’s video idea, or when making a video which doesn’t comply with the terms and conditions. YouTube has the right to delete or disable your channel without any reason provided.

4. Any advertiser can put an add on your video

This means that even your competitors can run an add on or near your video, which can hurt your brand.