Top 10 Tips On Getting a Better YouTube Thumbnail Click-Through Rate

Renee Teeley:

My first tip with thumbnails is really to make your title and thumbnail work together. So if you think about it, your title and your thumbnail, those two things together that essentially makes up your book cover. So, this is essentially your cover for your video, and it’s really what compels someone to click, to watch your video, or to skip your video entirely, and look for something else. So, it’s really important. So, my first tip is to make sure that your title and your thumbnail work together, and that they provide context to your video topic. So, one thing I want to note here is when you’re creating your thumbnail and your title, if you are putting text on your thumbnail, it doesn’t have to match what’s in your title. So for example, if your title says something like, “13 mistakes to avoid,” the thumbnail could just say something like, “Danger.” But, the important thing is those two things need to work together.

Dane Golden:

They’re a team.

Renee Teeley:

They’re a team. They are a team. They’re a dynamic duo.

Dane Golden:

All right. And, I want to give my next tip, which is how to use big faces with emotion. Now, these thumbnails for most people, 90 percent of the folks that see them, are going to see them super, super small. They call them thumbnails, because they’re about as big as your thumbnail, may be a little bit bigger. And so, you want to zoom in, and have big emotion, you can never be too close. If you think you’re close enough, you’re not, get closer. You’re an experienced photographer. I’ve heard one tip that pro photographers give to amateurs, and that is get closer. Is that true?

Renee Teeley:

Yeah. I think that a lot of people are… Well, with photography in general, people are afraid to get too close, because they want to give sort of the whole picture and context to that. But, when you get close to a subject, it really pulls in the viewer. There’s just something that just feels a little bit more intimate. And so, when you get close, it especially works well on thumbnails, because it’s a small image, especially if people are looking at it on a mobile device. So get closer, make that image stand out.

Dane Golden:

Okay. And, high emotions really work. Remember people are seeing these very small, so you have to exaggerate a little bit. So, if you’re taking photos of yourself for the thumbnail, you might want to use emotions like surprise, or joy, or even anger, or fear. And, you see a lot of thumbnails, particularly like, I don’t know why Nick Nimmin and Sean Cannell, they always do the regret, which is you’re sort of biting your lip, or you’re just sort of.

Dane Golden:

I’m a student of body language. I don’t know why the regret face seems to do well, but they like it. Also, we believe that a photo will do better, if the eyes are looking directly at the camera or viewer. Our eyes are drawn to people who are looking at us. If someone’s looking at you from across the room, whoever they are, you have to look at them. You’re drawn to that. That’s our belief. And, it doesn’t always have to work this way. Sometimes you can be looking at like, let’s say, the videos about which camera’s best. You can look at each camera. Eyes and teeth will also get you more clicks, than if you don’t show them. So, photos with eyes and teeth.

Renee Teeley:

So, I want to take a step back just to talk a little bit about the emotion part of it. So, I think it’s actually really important to include emotion in your photos. And, it’s something that I struggle with a lot, because I like the photos of me just smiling, they look better. Those are not always the photos that work best for thumbnails.

So, what makes you look your best, maybe isn’t the thing that is going to work best on the thumbnail. So, it is a good idea to show some emotion and yeah, Sean does use the photos of him kind of biting his lower lip. Sometimes that means, I think that he’s thinking about something. So, there’s a lot of different ways to interpret that. But, it is good to show emotion. I don’t particularly like the YouTube your face that much. And by YouTube...

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