Learn how to write the best title for a YouTube video for the tech industry.
Are you having a tough time getting your business out there on YouTube? I understand; getting clicks, views, and followers on YouTube can be a challenge. This article will help you to learn how to write the best title for a YouTube video. I looked at data on YouTube in the tech industry to see what helped videos get views. I chose YouTube because I know how this platform works.
When figuring out what I should do for this research article, I searched on the internet for best practices on YouTube. The two highest-ranking articles were on vidIQ and HubSpot. I noticed that on the two platforms, one of the best practices involved creating effective titles. So, I decided to see for myself how to write the best title for a YouTube video in the tech industry.
I obtained data by scraping YouTube videos within the tech industry. I took a small random sample from the tech industry on YouTube. I picked four random tech industry channels on YouTube. I then picked a random assortment of videos within each channel, totaling one-hundred videos. After that, I analyzed the titles of the videos and categorized them based on sentence type, i.e., imperative, declarative, interrogative, and based on if the video had a clickbait quality to it. I then created a code book to see how reliable my data was. My code book received a Cohen’s Kappa of 0.758, which means that this data is reliable. There were two specific YouTube channels that stuck out as the most effective in terms of titles: Mark Rober and Duolingo.
Here are a few tips on how to write the best title for a YouTube video in the tech industry.
Keywords
Both the individual words in the title clause and the clause as a whole play a role in creating a title people want to click on.
Your business name, department name, and other business specifics don’t have to be in the title. Most videos that do well (17 million views or greater) don’t have their business name in the title.
The clause that is used has to be something that no one has created before—unique. The specific words and numbers have to do with the video itself. The keywords you should use are the ones about the video—nothing else.
The example below is an effective YouTube title with good keywords. The video received over 96 million views.
CARNIVAL SCAM SCIENCE-and how to win – Mark Rober, Tech YouTuber.
Title type [Imperative(command), Interrogative(question), Declarative(statement)]
In my data, I noticed that there were only three sentence types that could be used in video titles: declarative, interrogative, and imperative. Some sentence types are better than others, especially in the tech industry.
In my data set, imperatives were never used, declaratives were the most used (97%) and had the most views, and interrogatives were second-most used (3%). Interrogatives were never used according to the data set.
Below is a good example of a declarative title.
How Duolingo changed my life | Real learner stories – Duolingo, language learning software.
Sentence meaning (
clickbait
or other)
The meaning of the sentence or clause is what will tie it all together.
I noticed that neither informative titles nor any other titles had as many views as videos with clickbait titles.
What is clickbait? It is a title that exaggerates something about your video to get people to click on your video. DISCLAIMER: Do not, I repeat, do not add anything false in your title just to get views. Adding false claims in your YouTube video title will destroy your credibility and make it difficult to get views on that video.
Some video titles do make seemingly wild claims, but they are true to the video. This is the secret key. Make any wild claim you want, but it has to be true to the video. Wild claims are odd and novel.
Below are two examples of effective YouTube titles that use truthful clickbait titles.
World's Largest Jello Pool-Can you swim in Jello?
Lawyer Fights Duolingo Owl for $2,700,000