Your Guide for Jumpstarting a Corporate YouTube Channel

A corporate YouTube channel is essentially a YouTube channel for a business. While YouTube doesn’t differentiate between individual and corporate channels, there are several things you can do to highlight the fact that your channel is representative of a business.

In this article, we’ll take you through all the steps you need to take to create a YouTube channel for your business. We’ll also share some handy tips with you, so your channel quickly amasses subscribers and user engagement in the form of likes and comments. So, without any further delay, let’s get into it!

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The YouTube channel creation process: A step-by-step guide

It takes only a few minutes to get your YouTube channel up and running. Here’s what you need to do:

• Create a Google account: A Google account is necessary for setting up a YouTube channel. While you can use your personal account for this purpose, we recommend creating a new Google account. This is due to the fact that account details of a corporate YouTube channel are often shared, and you wouldn’t want to share the details of your personal account, would you? It’ll take you only a couple of minutes to create a Google account. Once your Google account is ready, it’s time to move on to the next step.
• Log into your Google account and open the YouTube homepage: Following the creation of your new Google account, log into it and open YouTube in a fresh tab. By default, you will be logged into YouTube through the Google account you just set up. Additionally, after you log into YouTube, you’ll see that a basic channel has already been set up. However, at this juncture, you have to customize it for your business.
• Choose the name of your corporate YouTube channel: Customizing your channel begins with setting up the name of your business channel. To do this, hover your cursor over the avatar icon, which appears on your YouTube homepage screen’s top right corner, and click on it. A drop-down menu will appear. From the menu, click on the ‘My channel’ option. You’ll be taken to a screen where you have to enter your first name and your last name. Below the first and last name fields, you’ll see an option that says ‘Use business or other name.’ Click on this option and enter your preferred ‘Brand Account name’ on the next page. Click on ‘Create,’ and you’re done.
• Upload channel icon and channel art: Now that your basic YouTube business channel is created, it’s time to pay attention to how it looks. This is where your channel icon and channel art come into play. To customize both, click ‘Customize Channel’ on the page that appears after you’ve completed the previous step. The channel icon is the small rectangular box that sits on the left-hand side above the channel art, which is a much wider rectangle. You need to customize them separately by clicking on them individually and selecting your preferred images.
• Get the image dimensions right and experiment: For your channel icon, you should opt for an 800×800 pixels image. YouTube optimizes the image, after which the pixels drop to 98×98. For your channel art, it’s best to choose a 2560×1440 pixels image, which is optimized to 1546×423 pixels. However, ultimately, what dimensions you want to go with boil down to your preferences. It’s best to stick to the recommended dimensions as they are the optimal dimensions across the web and mobile platforms. YouTube also gives you the option of cropping the images as you see fit. You should also experiment with different channel icons and channel art combinations until you find one that’s perfect for your business.
• Write a compelling channel description: In the ‘About’ section, you can describe your channel and add links to your business’s official website and social profiles. While you can craft an elaborate description if you want, we recommend keeping it crisp, concise, and compelling. Use the space to inform viewers about who you are and what your channel is all about, and that should be enough. Also, target a few keywords to increase your channel’s discoverability but without resorting to keyword stuffing. Don’t forget to add links to your website and social profiles, as these may result in increased traffic to all your pages across the internet.
• Make your YouTube activity public: At the end of the day, YouTube is a community, and even if you aren’t posting videos, you can still let people know how active you are on the platform. The best ways to do this are to make your YouTube activity public and highlight featured channels. In terms of highlighting featured channels, you should opt for channels related to your niche (influencers and industry leaders). However, steer clear of highlighting direct competitors’ channels. Since you’ll be making your YouTube activity public as well, it’s important that you hit the like button on videos that are relevant to your content and niche. Even if you personally like controversial content on YouTube, remember not to ‘like’ them as that may damage your reputation. The same goes for subscriptions.

So, that’s it – your YouTube channel is ready, and you’re good to go! You can finally start publishing videos on the platform.

YouTube channel optimization: The top tips

Now that you know how to jumpstart your corporate YouTube channel, let’s take you through some handy optimization tips. Putting these into practice will increase the chances of getting more subscribers and free YouTube likes for your videos.

Welcome first-time viewers with a channel trailer

In the previous section, we mentioned how you could use the channel description section to tell viewers about yourself and your channel. Well, since YouTube is a video-centric platform, you should also create a channel trailer to supplement your description section. Typically, channel trailer videos on YouTube are up to a minute long. However, it’s completely down to you as to how long you want your channel trailer to be. We recommend not making it too elaborate, as it’s only meant to be a trailer and nothing more.

Pay attention to the details of every video you publish

YouTube gives you the opportunity to fill in a variety of details about each video you publish – don’t let it go to waste. For instance, if you want to make it easier for YouTube to crawl your videos, you should consider creating custom transcripts and captions for your videos. Also, you can use the videos’ tag, title, and description sections to add relevant tags and keywords to make them more discoverable not just on YouTube but on Google as well. You should also make eye-catching thumbnails, as thumbnails are the first things that viewers see when they search for videos. If you plan to post frequently, this might seem like a lot of work initially. However, once you get the hang of it, it won’t take you much time to optimize individual videos.

Use YouTube cards and end screen features

Cards and end screens are incredibly handy features on YouTube that content creators use to promote related content on their channels. For instance, you can add a card that promotes a relevant video as another video is playing. If you get the timing right, this is a great way of increasing watch time, which is one of the most important YouTube ranking metrics right now. You can also add end screens, which show up towards the end of your videos. YouTube offers a wide variety of templates to choose from, some of which can be used to promote two videos at a time. Basically, these features serve as backlinks within YouTube and can increase views and watch time across your channel.

Publish videos consistently

When it comes to video posting frequency on YouTube, it’s best to opt for consistency and not quantity. For instance, there are many channels that post new videos every week on a specific day at a particular time. Over time, this consistency can help your viewers to know when they can expect a new video from you. Creating a content calendar is ideal for achieving consistency, as it will allow you to work towards predetermined goals. Also, it’s important that you’re realistic when creating the content calendar, as you don’t want to overburden yourself with excessively high expectations. For instance, if you’re not very comfortable with editing, you should give yourself more time to create videos in the initial stages.

Conclusion

So, now that you know the YouTube channel creation process and the best tips to optimize your channel, we wish you all the best! Last but not least, we’d like to remind you that the YouTube space is only growing more and more competitive with time. So, remember to persevere. Even if your first few videos don’t generate too many views, it’s important that you keep going and make more videos. If your content has value to provide to your target audience, it will be viewed – that’s a guarantee!

And if you need some help initially, why not consider SubPals? SubPals is a software tool that allows you to get free YouTube subscribers. Additionally, you can also buy YouTube Video SEO through SubPals.