How can you use YouTube description links to promote your creative how-to videos?
Introduction
There are so many things that go into creating and publishing a YouTube video. One important element of the YouTube video publication process that is sometimes overlooked is links in YouTube video descriptions. These YouTube description links help viewers find products you recommend, follow you on other social media platforms, subscribe to your channel, find your website, engage with other videos you’ve created, and much more.
Geniuslink and SproutSocial are two different blogs that help readers create and maintain online platforms that thrive. In Geniuslink’s article Links in YouTube Description—A Guide, they discuss putting your most important links at the top of your description, maintaining broken links, and more. In SproutSocial’s article 11 Tips for Writing YouTube Descriptions, they discuss similar strategies for video descriptions that include repeating keywords, adding calls to action, and adding hashtags. I wanted to build on the practices that these two blogs discuss and test a new practice with a particular focus. And as an aspiring cake-maker, I knew that I wanted to focus on YouTube videos about projects or activities done from home.
So with that said, of all the different options for YouTube description links, have you ever considered just how many different types of links are best to include when you make your video? Is there a correlation between the different types of links you use in your video description and the amount of engagement your creative how-to video receives? Let’s talk about it!
Methods
Because YouTube description links can be such valuable assets, I wanted to do some research to see if the number of different types of links included in YouTube video descriptions correlate with the amount of engagement a creative how-to video receives. I measured engagement as the number of views a video collected. I looked at the video descriptions for various creative how-to video topics, including cooking, cake baking, home improvement, and makeup tutorials. For consistency, I took the first six videos from each search.
After I collected the video descriptions from six videos in each of these categories, I then created a codebook that listed the video descriptions in a column, and the different possible types of description links in a row. It was the coder’s job to evaluate each video description and mark a 0 or a 1 under the row heading—a 0 if the video description did not have that type of link, or a 1 if the video description did have that type of link. The possible description links were a link to a product, a link to subscribe, a link to social media, a link to another YouTube video, a link to a blog or website, a link to a recipe, a link to a discount code, or “other.”
My coder went through the codebook and marked 0s or 1s. I did the same. To make sure that the codebook was consistent, I compared my results to my coder’s and received a Cohen’s kappa of 0.75. This shows that the codebook was substantially consistent.
The ten videos I analyzed that had the highest number of views had an average of 3.22 different types of links in their description. The videos with the lowest number of views had an average of 3.13 different types of links in their description. Finally, the videos in the middle had an average number of 3.29 different types of links in their description. This data shows that there is almost no difference in the number of different types of description links, despite largely differing levels of engagement between creative how-to videos.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the best thing I can recommend for you in your YouTube description links is to consider what your viewers would respond to best as you post videos about activities or projects done from home. Look at it from their perspective. If you were to watch your video, what extra information would you look for in the description? What information can you offer that will further engage your audience and keep them coming back for more? If this means links to products, great! If it means links to other YouTube videos you have created, wonderful! Although there’s not a proven perfect number of links or type of link, there are so many different link options, so try different things and see what works best for your creative at-home videos.