New YouTube Feature To Increase Engagement

 YouTube announced this week that it is releasing a new feature from  beta testing that allows you to overlay thumbnails in the last 5-20 seconds of your YouTube clips.

• Promote a YouTube video or playlist. You can feature your most recent video, let YouTube pick one of your videos, or pick any video or playlist from your channel.
• Ask people to subscribe to your channel.
• Link to your website or an approved merchandise and crowdfunding website (you must provide a custom image, title, and pick the call-to-action).
• Promote another YouTube channel (you must provide a custom message).

Why should you care?

Up until now, you had to use Annotations to manually create end screens, but this was a desktop-only tool. End Screens will replace Annotations and work for both mobile and desktop viewers. One major benefit is that viewers will see your End Screens, even if they have annotations disabled.

The down-side is that End Screens will only work on videos that don’t use standard annotations.

Card teasers, featured content, branding watermarks, and other interactive elements won’t be shown during End Screens.

YouTube will provide data on your End Screen performance in your YouTube Analytics reports.

This feature will be a major benefit to many businesses (not just bloggers) wanting to build subscribers, including the automotive industry (an early adopter of video content promotion). Companies that create “how to” content to support their product may also see greater uptake and engagement and should consider incorporating End Screens as standard practice in all content.

It  would also be worthwhile considering republishing existing content, reformatted to support the End Screen feature.

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