Duke on YouTube Pro Tips from ONC

As we begin Fall semester, I wanted to take an opportunity to plug Duke’s YouTube channel, a great place to put promotional videos and other content you’d like to be seen as widely as possible. The way it works is that individual schools and departments set up their own channels, and follow a process (described here) to connect those channels to the main Duke Channel. That channel is managed by Sonja Foust of Duke’s Office of News and Communications. Sonja just sent out a few tips to YouTube channel managers at Duke that I thought I’d share more broadly since this information is relevant for anyone using YouTube. If you have questions about setting up or managing content on Duke on YouTube, feel free to contact Sonja. Her email is sonjadotfoustatdukedotedu.

I wanted to let you know about a YouTube pro tip (which also makes my job a lot easier!): If you’re putting up a video that’s not ready for prime-time, meaning you’re not ready to have it promoted or it’s a draft video or a video meant for internal circulation only, you can upload that video with a status of “unlisted.” The unlisted status means that you can share the link and anyone will be able to view it from that link, but it won’t show up on your channel page or in subscription feeds (including mine). Then, if you decide you want to make the video public later when it’s all approved and ready to go, you can reset it to “public” and it will show up on your channel page and in the subscription feeds.

Uploading your videos this way helps me to know when your video is ready to be promoted and keeps me from picking up a link to a video that’s still a draft or still in the approval process.

 Also, once your video is ready to be promoted, please be sure you’re putting in a descriptive title and a compelling summary description. This helps your viewing audience (including me!) to know what your video is about, but it also helps your video to come up in YouTube’s search results. For more on descriptions, titles, and tags, you can check out our YouTube upload checklist here: http://styleguide.duke.edu/toolkit/video/youtube-publishing-checklist/

 Lastly, I want to make sure you’re aware that we offer a ton of really helpful video resources on the Video Toolkit on the Duke Style Guide, here: http://styleguide.duke.edu/toolkit/video/ You’ll find links to our graphics package, which you can use for the fly-in intro and lower thirds that you see on lots of Duke videos, and even tips on lighting and video production, as well as resources for free music beds and b-roll footage.