Have you thought about getting on the bandwagon with YouTube Shorts?
If you’re late to the party, YouTube Shorts as explained by HootSuite, are “short-form, vertical video content created using a smartphone and uploaded directly to YouTube from the YouTube app.” They can be up to 60 seconds, and they stay on your YouTube channel forever, unlike some other platforms – think Instagram stories – which disappear after several hours.
YouTube shorts had its global roll out in July 2021 and was wildly successful reporting 6.5 billion daily views with 1.5 billion logged in users watching it monthly. It continues to impress having crossed 50 billion views a day, as reported by YouTube in their Q1 2022 earnings.
But, if you’re still not sure if you want to take the plunge and try it out, YouTube just a launched a few cool updates which may give you the impetus to try it out.
YouTube now gives creators more insight into how their shorts content is performing.
As discussed in this video from Creator Insider, “The goal of this launch is to help creators better understand their content’s performance in the shorts feed. Now prior to this launch, creators were able to see their thumbnail impression rates. However, this did not allow creators to understand if a short was shown in a feed or if it was viewed or swiped away. With this launch creators can now understand how often a short was shown in the feed, if viewers chose to view or swipe away. In addition to the already existing number of views that resulted from this.”
In addition, the demographics analytics section got an overhaul too. With the improved version, creators can filter by format which gives fresh insight into who is viewing your Shorts content vs. your regular video uploads. If that wasn’t enough, a new chat moderation update was added which gives people the ability to assign new or existing moderators as explained by Social Media Today.
Lastly, my favorite update, Creator Music is now available to everyone in the USA.
If you’re unfamiliar with Creator Music – you can now add music to your videos by purchasing songs or sharing revenue with the creator. Music just makes things so much better doesn’t it?
All of these new features are really making the format attractive to creators. If you’re still not sold, you may want to keep YouTube Shorts in mind as a good alternative to TikTok considering America may give them the boot in the foreseeable future.
Photo credit: iStock.com/hapabapa
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Alyssa Collins hails from Minnesota, where snowy days were the perfect excuse to stay warm inside and write. Over the years, she turned that joy into a career and has authored numerous articles for various publications (under pen names). Email Alyssa via alyssa@ynot.com.
