A YouTube annotation is a caption that is added after you’ve uploaded your video. It could be a promotional message or a link to another of your videos.
If used wisely and sparingly, annotations can work as a powerful marketing tool.
Here’s an example I set up for East Glos Club. They’ve had a promotional video on their site for some time and the club was holding an open day. >>
I simply added an annotation which appeared on the video at 00:12 seconds and again at 00:50.
It appears this quickly to ensure people see the message soon after video has started.
In this case the annotation is quite large but it was only going to be on the video for a month so we were not too bothered about this!
It is possible to make the annotations smaller to avoid the viewer becoming distracted. You can also link the annotation to another YouTube video. Below is a good example on the viral video “Charlie Bit my Finger”. They’re promoting a new video and also an iPhone app.
EDIT: If you want to get really creative, Suraj Sodha of Rapid Leverage Marketing has a great video tutorial on how to add an interactive “outro” video to an existing YouTube video.
If you need some help on adding annotations to your YouTube videos do get in touch.
nice post, Julian. I use these a lot in my videos for lots of different purposes – either to get people to subscribe, click on another video or click on an external link. I’ve definitely noticed an increase in subscribers, traffic, views etc as a result.
They are super easy to create and you can get creative with it too by using a custom outro video and overlaying it with hyperlinked annotations (I believe you’ve seen my video tutorial on this on Google+ ?)
Absolutely Suraj, lots of different ways to use annotations. I’ve edited the post to add a link to your tutorial as this is useful for people wanting to take this to the next level.
Awesome! Thanks for the link to the video Julian 🙂