What is a YouTube Story?
A story is a short, live video that you can access through a creator’s profile picture, which appears with a colorful ring around it. When tapping this to watch the video, you will be able to enjoy or skip by tapping on the video for the next story, or you can hold down to pause. YouTube stories are great for sharing content that creators want their audience to be involved in, e.g. Instagram allows you to interact with your followers using polls/questionnaires and mention others using tags and hashtags, allowing them to interact and grow their audience.
Image source (https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/youtube-rolls-out-stories-to-creators-with-over-10k-subscribers/)
How to upload a YouTube story
I will just start by saying this: before you spend ages trying to work out how to upload a YouTube story (as I did), I quickly realised it was only for creators with over 10,000 subscribers. But if that is you, great! You can create a story on YouTube, simply by clicking on the video icon at the top right-hand side of your app. This gives you a drop-down option list including Video, Live Story and Post. Clicking on ‘Story’ will allow you to record your live videoas you would on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, and it even allows you to use filters!
How this changes the app
YouTube is onto bigger and better things; it’s no longer just that app you use to watch how-to videos. YouTube holds the key for the future of video and it’s on the way up with its new story feature, giving users the chance to create shorter and quicker content for their audience. Not only is the app becoming more interactive; it is now introducing a music player feature where you can save your favourite songs to a playlists just as you would with Spotify or Apple Music.
YouTube ads
YouTube can provide a platform to target key audiences. We can now define down audiences to Affinity, in-market, Remarketing, Similar or even key demographics. With the increased competition of social ads and the wealth of audience data available, Google has increased their targeting audiences and cost efficiencies of running either TrueView or bumper ads. Bumper ads create snappy 5 second videos, to engage users straight into video content, while TrueView allows for rich 30 second content, allowing a story to be told to the user – charged on a CPV rate from as low as 1p a click!
Could your company benefit from YouTube advertising? If you’re not sure where to get started, fear not; we’ve got a dedicated team to help you develop your YouTube strategy. Give us a call to find out how we can help!