Tips for sharing videos with YouTube

If you want to just search for some tips – this search will look up the YouTube support pages and videos from YouTube’s help channel.

Otherwise here are some of the most common questions you might come across when trying YouTube for the first time.

What is YouTube?
How do I get started?
How do I record videos?
How do I upload videos?
Organising your videos – channels
What is tagging?
Things you can do with YouTube
More info

Extra background here

Beginner’s guide to YouTube

What is YouTube?

YouTube is the biggest and best know video-sharing website in the world. It is now owned by Google and in the UK 2.4 billion videos were viewed on YouTube in April 2009. It enables you to upload and share videos of up to 10 minutes length.

How do I get started?

Create a free YouTube account by going to ‘Sign Up‘

How do I record videos?

Videos can be filmed on most digital cameras, a camcorder, webcam or easiest of all using a Flip video camera or similar. Usually you need to download the file to your computer before uploading it to YouTube, but you can upload or email videos directly to YouTube from some phones. Uploading video usually takes longer than downloading (especially if you are using a normal ADSL broadband connection). The video needs to be right format (QuickTime .MOV, Windows .AVI, or .MPG files – any new camera will make these) It will also take a while once you have uploaded video to YouTube for it to be processed, usually only a few minutes though.

How do I upload videos?

Transfer the video to your computer (either onto the desktop or My Videos on a PC) – once you’re logged into YouTube click on the the yellow ‘Upload’ button in the top right hand corner. Select ‘Upload video and find the video file you want to upload. You’ll need to give it a title, description and category and then wait while it uploads.

Organising your videos – channels

You can tailor the look of your YouTube page by changing the background colour, adding a logo to make it look more like your website perhaps. You can also change the layout to promote certain videos so that not just the most recent ones appear prominently.
eg http://www.youtube.com/user/westmidlandspolice
You can point to this page from your website and use this page to gather all your videos together. You can also use it to point people back to your website when they come across videos through searching Youtube, so make sure you include links back there.
You can also organise your videos by creating playlists that act as folders for different videos.

What is tagging?

Tags are really useful because they help you and anyone else searching for videos to find out more about each one. Good tagging makes your videos more findable which can lead to new users on YouTube, perhaps people working in your area or other people interested in your work.

You can also use tags to gather together lots of people’s videos from an event for example by creating a unique tag (eg rebootbritain) and link to it

It also means videos can be aggregated outside of YouTube http://addictomatic.com/topic/rebootbritain on other websites

Things you can do with YouTube

Record an event: a launch or opening and embed the video in a blog post about it – don’t necessarily record the formal bits, just ask a speaker after they have finished what they were talking about
Capture peoples, ideas, thoughts and opinions (‘voxpops’) with short interviews
Find other users doing similar work (by searching for relevant tags or locations) and subscribe to their videos so that when they upload new ones, you are notified