Why YouTube titles and thumbnails are critical

Why YouTube titles and thumbnails are critical

Matt Hames Matt Hames

Matt Hames

Difference Maker at 3 Enrollment Marketing, Inc.

发布日期: 2022年5月12日
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You've worked really hard on that video. You shot it, you edited it, you scored it, and you placed it natively on all the digital platforms.

Natively on LinkedIn – with captions.

Natively on Facebook – with captions_en.

Natively on YouTube – with captions.

YouTube is the second-most used search engine.

Your video will get searched for, and your video will get impressions. YouTube will deliver it to people in search, in suggested videos, and on the home page of YouTube.

They will do this based on a lot of things, but one is click-through rate.

The click-through rate is the % of people who see your thumbnail and title divided by the number of people who watch.

If the video is called "ASD Panel" and the thumbnail is of the exact halfway part of the video, then the video will probably not get a lot of clicks when it launches. So it will get fewer impressions and fewer views.

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What makes a good thumbnail?

The thumbnail and title are an ad for the video. The image can have text:

No alt text provided for this image

The image above is from Mr. Beast, widely considered one of the best YouTubers at making titles and thumbnails. Since this is from my YouTube, which I share with a teenage boy, you can also see the red line under some videos that he watched. These thumbnails are not from the video, they are definitely made for the video.

Mr. Beast hit on really impactful, clickbaity headlines: "I Gave My Credit Card To Random People" (top left) with a staged photo. This resulted in a click from my teenager.

The headline should give a reason to watch, and the image should work with the headline. The headline and image aren't far from an email subject line, the only goal is to get watched.

"Why they decided to attend college" might be the headline on a thumbnail with some alumni with a title: "School alumni explain why students should attend"

Instead, it is sometimes called "ASD alumni panel - 04/30/22" and no one cares.

The thumbnail and headline have to make people care. Then YouTube will show it to more people.

What do you think? What's the best headline in the wild?

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Higher Education Digital

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Raymond L Burton

Digital marketing & website development services

2 年

Thumbnails and titles are pretty much the end game on youtube. If you don't get it right... you're sunk from the start. Great article.

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