Ian Robertson
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk, everyone. So today we have a very short solo podcast talking about YouTube shorts. Now on the program here we talk a lot about TikTok, it is a very important social media platform that we should be on. Some of us are on it, some of us aren’t, that’s fine. But I want to talk about YouTube shorts, because in my opinion, we’ve been testing this for quite some time now just trying to find the right angle, the right formula to get things just perfect. And I actually think, in some ways, in a lot of ways, possibly YouTube shorts are better than TikTok. I know. I said that. And I’m going to just lay that out there and see what sticks to the wall. But before I get into a very basic formula, here’s why I think it’s better.
So first of all, you can target audiences a little bit easier. So TikTok tends to send it out, generally speaking, tries to figure out who’s interested in it. YouTube has some, you know, more advanced level stuff where you can target people in a certain area a little bit better. Also, I have seen the same videos on TikTok, you know, can reach a few hundred people, and there’s guys out there that are getting like 15,000 to 100,000 views, whatever it is, that’s fine. But I’ve put videos on TikTok and gotten decent views. But then I’ve gotten, you know, four or 5000 views on YouTube shorts. And they’re also what we call legacy views. So the life of a TikTok is actually very short, unless it’s trending and getting 100,000 views, it’s not going to last very long. Typically, if you’re getting three or 4000 views, it’s going to be over the matter of you know, sometimes a few hours or a day or two max, whereas YouTube shorts, they peak, typically within a day, but then you can see a resurgence. So there’s been YouTube shorts that I’ve put up that I’ve gotten, you know, 1000 views, I’m like, okay, cool. And then two weeks later, I get another 1000 then it drops off. And then for some reason a month or two later, I get another 2000. So legacy views, they happen more on YouTube than they do on TikTok. So, what you put on YouTube shorts are going to last a lot longer and benefit you a lot longer than TikTok.
But really, it comes down to, in my opinion, targeting areas and getting more engagement. Targeting areas that is obviously important because if we live in Wyoming, and we’re getting a lot of views in Florida, not really helping out our business. I mean, it does, but it doesn’t. So there’s some spatial arguments, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. But we want to keep things simple. So I’m going to tell you how to do this real simple and real quick. And I am of the belief that if we don’t keep things simple, most people won’t do it, there’s always going to be the oddball person like me, that’s just going to obsess over it and do it every which way possible. For most of us though, we have to keep it simple, right? Otherwise, we’re not going to do it. So here’s the simple part of it.
Take a video with your phone, and you’re going to do it with the video, you know, with your phone upright, it’s called portrait, I believe, I was getting that confused. So keep your phone upright. For us older folks, that’s typically how we do our video. So keep it under one minute. And that’s really where we’re going to struggle because we as home inspectors like things to be detailed, that’s fine if we have a longer version of the video that we put in our YouTube channel. But a YouTube short is going to get a lot more views than one of our longer videos. So if we put up a longer video and make it a few 100 views, put up a YouTube short, few 1000 sometimes or many more. So under one minute, you can have the app on your phone, record something and it can be anything like hey, here’s a, I always use the mummified squirrel in the attic illustration or something interesting going on or something that we don’t think is interesting. But you know what people listening are, you can go back to our podcast where we talked about social media and a couple of podcasts with Mike Ortiz, Kevin Maxwell, and some others to get some ideas of what to post. But in short, under a minute, upload the video, that’s it, if you want to keep things at the basics, that’s all we need to do. As long as it’s under one minute, YouTube will automatically put it in the shorts category. So if we want to get a little bit more advanced, this is going to sound like a lot but it takes me on average about three minutes to get this done. So under a minute video, upload three minutes, let’s say a minute to do whatever, we’re averaging five minutes, five minutes during our day to get some pretty amazing marketing. That’s pretty awesome. I’m not gonna go into some of the more advanced stuff. I’m going to keep it very basic, and if you want to get a little bit further into it, you can, but here’s some of the basics.
So first of all, use hashtags. And you’re gonna see lots of people have different opinions on hashtags. The reality of it is, in my opinion, it works. And I use hashtags. And I’ve seen my videos increase when I use hashtags. But I say I use hashtags in that if I watch a video that I like and has a hashtag, and it says, you know, #Duneboardgame, ooo, I’d love to see more videos about Dune board games, so I click the hashtag. People use them. Maybe we don’t, maybe we do. But they’re useful. Anecdotally, I find that it actually gets more views on my video when I do use them, though. So hashtag is for us older folks. It’s a pound sign. So hit the pound sign/hashtag, and then start adding words after it. So say we shot a video of a collapsing chimney. And we want to put it on YouTube, we can do #chimney. And once you start typing in chimney, you’ll see other stuff, chimney, repair, deteriorated chimney, etc. Some hashtags that you want to use regularly, is you can create your own hashtags, or create a hashtag with your business name. That way, if people find you, are like, oh, I’d love to follow more of this guy’s videos, and they click on the hashtag first. So get that going, create that hashtag. So to do that, you’re just going to do #yourcompanyname, make sure you spell it properly. That’s a common issue with hashtags. And then off you go. Now the next time you type that same hashtag, or a time or two, after, you will start to see your company name come up as an option for hashtags. So that’s a good thing. So try to do things like home inspection and home inspector, use singular and plural, try to capture all those audiences. Don’t worry too much about well, this one has 36 million views, this hashtag, and this one has 100 views, use the ones that apply. Sometimes a niche audience is the best audience, put a few in your title. And that’s something that I see guys actually lose out on is they make their title too long. I think it’s 100 characters if I remember right, I could be wrong about that, that we have in our title. And I see some guys fill it up and keyword stuff and keep the title simple – collapsing chimney on a home inspection. Maybe even that’s too long. That could be your title, and then maybe one or two hashtags after that. And then use hashtags in the body. So just like a regular YouTube video and the body will have room for hashtags again, but again, have a, be discreet about which hashtags you use. The video title is important, then the description, make sure in the description, you describe the video real quick, you don’t have to go into a long discourse about it, they’re YouTube shorts, most people aren’t reading the descriptions, they’re more for the algorithm in my opinion. Again, a lot of this is anecdotal. Some of its, you know, quote, unquote, fact. But a lot of it’s anecdotal from my own experience. I don’t read the comments for the most part, I just click on hashtags and things like that.
But make sure we have a short description, hey, we were on a home inspection in Albany, New York, and this is a chimney we found, etc. Always leave your website address. So to find out more about home inspections in Albany and chimney repair, visit www.myhomeinspectionwebsite.com and your phone number. If you want to go that route, because to be honest with you, if you’re worried about spammers calling you, they’re just going to visit your website and call you that way anyways, so in my opinion, leave your phone number, give people an opportunity to get a hold of you, especially if they have questions about home inspections. And then usually I like to leave the hashtags at the bottom of that description. So that’s the first point, use hashtags. And I guess I kind of rolled in the title of your video and the body of your video matter.
Make sure we’re not keyword stuffing, like you know, broken chimney home inspection-Albany home inspections-home inspector near me, you know, to be honest with you, most of those tend to be a little bit silly and make it so less people watch your video. So try not to keyword stuff, keep the title short, you can geotag your video in the description a bit. That’s okay, just make sure it’s natural. Video title matters also too in the actual name of the video. This is something that I found out many years ago, if you upload a video and it’s video or my movie or videos 123 And then we change the title in YouTube, it actually doesn’t have the same impact, it’s a little bit of a refinement to put in what our title of our video is going to be, make that the title of our video in the file itself that we upload. So change the file name to damaged chimney on a home inspection, then when you upload that the title is already going to be there for you. It’ll auto populate but it’ll also be the name of the file. And I find that that tends to make the video a little bit more optimized for SEO there. SEO optimized is a little bit redundant, isn’t it.
Alright, so some videos, this will be a little bit of a side point, some videos we put up, we get discouraged. We’re like man, I got five views. That was my best video. And then we put another video up, and it’s terrible, and all of a sudden it gets 5000 views. We’re like, what in the world, how the heck did that happen, I have not found rhyme or reason for it, we can’t anticipate what people are interested in sometimes. I have put videos up that I thought were terrible. And like I just said, 5000 views and some of my best videos, maybe a couple dozen, don’t get discouraged. I do find that posting four to five times a week is the sweet spot. The more we post, the more we keep people engaged. We don’t want to post too much, don’t want to post too little. If we’re posting once a month or once a week, I mean, if that’s what you can do, cool, keep it simple, as we said before, but if you want to get a little more advanced, I tend to have four or five videos ready for the next week. That’s what I typically tend to do. Some are great, some are not. But in this particular case, this is one of the few cases where having, okay, content is better than no content at all.
Time of day does matter I have found. I have experimented with just about every time of day possible. And I find that 8:30am Eastern is when I get the most views, no idea why. I’m sure there’s probably some information out there that tells us exactly why. But that’s what I find. Personally, I think it’s just because that’s when people on the East Coast are getting their day started and just before people on the west coast and the rest of the country and, and all that are getting their day going. So maybe it just pops up at the right time. But I’ve tried at noon, I’ve tried 5am I’ve tried every possible time that I could think of I tried. 8:30am Eastern is pretty much what I found. So you’re gonna do 5:30am you know, West Coast time, Pacific, if you’re not up at that time, don’t, don’t think too hard about that, there was a marginal, and I say marginal, very slight increase in views from 8:30 to 10:30 within that range, but 8:30 was always the best. Don’t schedule them is also what I have found. We have a tendency that, and I was doing this for quite some time, schedule out my videos. So I’d have the whole week done for the sake of simplicity. When I stopped scheduling out my videos, the video views increased like four or five times. I honestly don’t know if that’s exactly why. But I started scheduling some videos as an experiment, and they consistently got less views. No idea if that’s a Google or YouTube algorithm thing or not. But try not to schedule out the videos. Personally, if I’m on an inspection and I’m up in the attic, there’s usually not anybody around with me, four or five minutes while I’m making notes on the inspection, post the video, can we post the video in between our inspections take four or five minutes then. Do it live basically, is what I’m saying. Take the video, upload it, you can have the app right on our phone.
Another thing, actually Mike Ortiz mentioned this on one of our podcasts, don’t use videos that have the TikTok logo on them on YouTube. So I experimented with us to see if it was true. And I have found, anecdotally again, if you have the TikTok logo on there, YouTube doesn’t really like it. And you can kind of understand why. Because if we have a company, we don’t want to have another company being advertised on our service, right? We go to do a home inspection and on all of our tools is a sticker for another home inspection company. That’s not going to look good, right? So same thing with YouTube, they don’t want to advertise TikTok on YouTube video. So again, anecdotally videos that have the TikTok logo on YouTube shorts, do not, do not do well. So make sure we take the raw video.
Another thing is don’t use copyrighted music. Now that’s something on TikTok for those of us who use it, we’re used to doing, because TikTok will allow you to use music that would otherwise be copyrighted on their platform, because the musicians allow it. So you can have a very popular song, and we’re like, oh man that really went well with this video. So we put it on our YouTube short. And now YouTube is rejecting our video. If that happens enough, again, anecdotally, I find that YouTube’s kind of leery about your videos, and it’s not going to trend like you might like. Plus, you could get in trouble. Really not a fantastic idea. So it may not be as ideal for us like man, that music really went well with that TikTok video, and it did really well, pull back on the copyrighted music. Most, if not all, of my YouTube shorts, actually don’t have music. And interestingly enough, they do better. I don’t know if it’s the crowd that uses YouTube. We have to remember there are certain demographics that use different platforms. Facebook is going to be you know, people that are 40 and above. They always say it’s our grandparents’ platform. But ironically, Facebook is still the one of the most, if not the most heavily used, social media platform, but that’s beside the point. You’re gonna get people between 35 and 45, they’re using Instagram. TikTok is definitely the 20 to 30 crowd and younger. YouTube tends to be a little bit more multigenerational. You’re gonna get people that are very young, and very old, but for the most part, it’s going to be, you know, like 30 to 50 crowd, and then the older generation uses it too. So they’re not as interested in having hip young music, I think. And again, just anecdotally, I don’t know why. But yeah, YouTube shorts, keep it simple. Add music. It does perform pretty well with music, though. So if you can get uncopyrighted music, cool, go for that. That’s the best thing you can do.
Again, just as a thought, you can take all of those points. And there’s more. I didn’t share them all here because it didn’t want to say, okay, here’s everything that you could possibly do. But keep it simple. If we get 4000 views, that’s great. Is that as good as 4800 views? No, but if it’s the 80/20 rule. If a little bit of effort gets us 80% of the way there, but then hours of effort, get us the extra 20, is that extra 20% really worth it? Shoot for the 80%. Throw in some hashtags, throw up some videos, see where they land. If we want to get a little bit more advanced, maybe we have a marriage mate that’s in the office and can do some videos for us. Awesome. They can do the more advanced stuff, but I would rather have you get 4000 views, 40,000 views, 400,000 views, then 4800 you know, 48,000, that extra percentage is really not going to be that hypercritical, in my opinion. So MED, minimum effective dose, if we’ve ever heard that, that concept before.
So again, this is just a podcast about YouTube shorts. It’s just another part of our marketing wheel. If we’re not doing them right now, we really, really should. If we’re doing TikTok, awesome. You have everything all set up to do it. If we’re not doing TikTok, very likely, we probably have a YouTube channel, use it. YouTube shorts are in my opinion, as good or better than TikTok sometimes. It depends on how you’re using it. But again, thanks for listening in to Inspector Toolbelt Talk, and we’ll catch you next time.
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