YouTube Best Practices

YouTube Best Practices.

YouTube Best Practices

When adding videos to YouTube or MediaSpace, there are a few things you’ll want to consider so your videos make it onto your website, comply with all applicable rules, and are directing visitors to your other content:

Running a YouTube Channel

While it’s easy to set up your own YouTube channel, it’s not easy to transfer these videos from one person or account to another. If you do set up a YouTube channel for your team, try to make a new YouTube account for this purpose (e.g., “Michigan State University Extension Food Safety Team”) that you can share with other team members. This will help ensure the organization retains control of its content over time.

Video Summary

Many visitors may locate your video on YouTube or MediaSpace without ever seeing your website. To ensure that these visitors can find additional information that’s relevant to your video topic, you should strongly consider linking to your website from your video descriptions.

Video Tags

Although tags on your YouTube or MediaSpace videos do not carry over into dotCMS, they can still be very useful to help direct visitors to OTHER related videos. Please consider tagging your videos in these systems just as you would in dotCMS.

DotCMS Video Entries

Videos do not automatically get added to dotCMS when you add them to YouTube or MediaSpace. Rather, you need to use the Content Search screen in dotCMS to add a new “Video” entry, tag it, and paste the video embed code into the Embed URL box. For more information on how to publish a video in dotCMS, see this training documentation. For instructions on locating the video embed code, see https://www.canr.msu.edu/anrcom/social-media-website/website-documentation/content/videos

Digital Accessibility

MSU’s digital accessibility policy requires that all videos be captioned, and automatic captions are typically not sufficient to comply with this requirement. For more information on captioning your videos, please see https://webaccess.msu.edu/Help_and_Resources/caption-guide.html

Video Best Practices

For tips and tricks on shooting high-quality videos, see Best Practices for Recording Video.

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