One Channel love?
The new Youtube channel design called ‘One channel’ was released last month giving brands the opportunity to personalize and organize their channel in new ways. Love it or loathe it, we've highlighted the main changes...
1. Channel trailers
Channel owners now have the ability to upload a 'Trailer' video that appears to non-subscribed viewers and autoplays on your channel's homepage. The trailer’s purpose is to showcase your videos in the hope of encouraging viewers to subscribe to your channel. An example of how this might be used is a welcome by a business owner that introduces you to the type of videos you might find on their channel and encourages you to explore further and subscribe.
2. Personalising with Channel Art and Icons
Previously channel owners could upload a background image to customise their channels. Youtube have now replaced this with the ability for owners to upload a header image (Channel art) that will display better across different device screens. It makes perfect sense. There is an ever-growing range of different devices that YouTube can be viewed on. In the not too distant past, it need only have worked on Personal Computers but Youtube’s new challenge is giving user’s the ability to produce a channel that will look good everywhere – desktop PC screens, laptops, connected TVs and the increasingly important mobile market of smartphones and tablets.
The new cross-platform Channel art also serves as a background for your 'Channel icon'. As before this is a square avatar that could be your brands’ logo that sits top left.
3. External links
External links have moved to the 'About' tab where they are less conspicuous than on the previous side panel position. If you want to make them more obvious you can also superimpose up to 4 Social Media link buttons and a website link over the header. We think this is a good way to drive traffic from your Youtube page to your other channels, because the overlay buttons are so prominent. Consider how these will look on your header image but it's easy to experiment.
4. Adding sections
There are now more options on how you can present your videos and playlists. While adding videos to playlists is nothing new, the new roll-out means more flexibility to customise your layouts making it easier to organise videos into highly visible “sections” on a topic of interest. For example you can create a section of most "Popular uploads" and organise this as a horizontal scroller or vertical list. This means you can now sort videos not only by playlist but also by 8 methods including Tags, Popularity and Likes. They all appear on your channel’s homepage and you can re-order them by hovering your cursor over the left hand edge of your section and dragging to the desired spot.
Closing remarks Currently if you move to the new design, you still have the opportunity to switch back to the old design if you wish. However, as social network managers know, you are always at the mercy of new design roll-outs, good or bad, and it’s only a matter of time before Google-owned Youtube will make these changes mandatory.
So if your Youtube presence is important to you or your clients it may be worth familiarising yourself with the changes sooner rather than later.
Our first opportunity to use these new features was a commission to create a branded YouTube Channel for one of our clients. If that's something we can help you with, get in touch.