Where to start with YouTube
YouTube is a video sharing website which lets anyone sign up for a free account and post a video online.
These videos appear on the website YouTube.com, and are also made available for people to share through an HTML link which lets anyone embed the video in a web page or blog.
YouTube enables anyone to broadcast to the world, and many museums can be found on the website.
Setting up your account
Anyone can watch a video on YouTube, but to upload videos you will need to set up an account. You can find the ‘create account’ button in the top left of the YouTube.com homepage.
Firstly you will be asked to select a username, this name will be visible on your YouTube page, every video that you upload and in your YouTube channels website address so I’d suggest that you use the name of your Museum.
Click ‘create account and finish’ and this will send a verification email to the address that you entered into your registration, this contains a link which you must click to confirm your email address is valid.
Getting started with YouTube
Now that you are a member of YouTube, you can start to upload and share video, but I would suggest that you take some time to customize your YouTube profile first.
Click on your username in the top right hand corner and select ‘account’ from the drop down menu, this will reveal an overview of your account. Here you will be able to add an user icon and add details of your Museum and your website address to your profile setup
Customizing your YouTube Theme
As well as adding information in to your profile, you might want the look of your channel to be more in line with your Museums branding. You can do this by through the ‘Themes and Colours’ page in your ‘Channel Design’ options.
The ‘Themes and Colours’ page allows you to pick from a series of different coloured themes or create your own by selecting ‘show advanced options’.
These advanced options let you create your own colour palette for your page, and upload a background image.
Uploading Video
Click the ‘Upload’ button in the top right of your browser and this will bring you to the video upload section of your account.
You’ll notice that under the “upload video” section there are some options for connecting your YouTube account to you social networks, this may be something you want to consider when you have got to grips with YouTube.
Click the ‘upload video’ button and select the video which you would like to upload from your hardrive. YouTube accepts videos in most formats, though the file size is limited to 2 gigabites and the film length to 10 minutes.
When you select the video, it automatically starts to upload and as you are waiting for this to happen, you are asked to provide a title, description and descriptive tags which will help people to find and understand what your film is about.
You will also be asked if you would like to keep your film private, or share it. I’d suggest that you keep the video private until you have checked that your happy with the way it looks.
Sharing your video
One of the great features of YouTube, is that once you have uploaded a video to the website, it is very easy to share this by copying and pasting a piece of HTML code.
To the right of your video you will notice that underneath your username and the video description that there are two boxes one marked URL and the other marked EMBEDDED.
The URL link is simply the address of the video on YouTube, making it easy to tell people where they can find the film. The EMBEDDED link is actually a piece of HTML which can be pasted into your website, blog of Facebook page and which will embed your video on that site without the user having to visit YouTube.
As well as embedding your video in blogs, facebook and websites most museums also allow the public to share their content in this way, however you don’t have to do this if you feel uncomfortable letting go of copyrighted material.
Comments and Ratings
Each video on YouTube is given a rating out of five by those who watch your film, as well as rating each film, You Tube also encourages users to leave comments which can be written or even filmed on a webcam.
What to do with YouTube
Now you have set up your account, you’ll need to fill it with great content. Here is an article I recently wrote about 5 ways for your Museum to use YouTube. This should give you a starting point for your YouTube content.
Do you have any YouTube tips that you’d like to share? Leave a comment.
I use YouTube simply as a place to put webcam clips which I then embed into a blog. But here are a few tips I’d like to suggest:
Use the “Edit Channel” tool. Here you can go to the “Videos & Playlists” Tab and alter which video appears in your channel. You might want the most recently uploaded one to be the most prominent, or you can select a particular video to always show, irrespective of what you upload.
“Player View” seems to give a more professional appearance to a channel than “Grid View”.
It’s worth tidying up your channel’s appearance with the “Modules” Tab. Consider deselecting all the tick boxes to remove details like comments, your recent activity, who subscribes to your videos, etc.
I once fell foul of allowing Channel comments by default. Although I got notification when a comment was left on an individual clip, I’d not realised viewers could comment on the entire channnel, too. There were a year’s worth of spam adverts for sex sites, plus a few other unpleasant remarks. I’ve now disabled this option!
If, like me, you run a work-related YouTube channel from home, beware too of enabling any setting that send notifications to Facebook or Twitter when you’ve favourited or commented on other people’s videos- or that show what you’ve been viewing in a personal capacity. Check which boxes are ticked in the “Activity Sharing” tab in you Account Settings as this can reveal your viewing habits too.
Finally, I need to upload a lot of recorded webcam clips to YouTube, and to do it quickly. I find the best way is to edit the video clip whilst its still stored on the DVD recorder’s hard drive. I burn this to a DVD RW disk where the video is contained in the largest .VOB file present. I copy that to my PC, simply changing the file extension to .MPG before uploading it straight to YouTube. Xilisoft Ripper is a low-cost solution to converting larger DVD recordings to .AVI format for editing and captioning in simple programmes like Adobe Premiere Elements.
What is the general advice about accepting friends on YouTube for museum channels? I don’t want us to appear unfriendly, but I’ve been getting requests from some obvious self-promoters in non-related industries. Will a museum’s YT friend list have any impact on the channel’s other users/subscribers? Is there a downside to not being selective about YT friend requests or should a museum add anyone who asks?