Tutorial: How to Add Interactivity to Your YouTube Videos - Streaming Media Producer

Learn some constructive ways on how to make your YouTube videos more interactive. Why? It may create a better experience for your viewers and it will give you data that you can track and analyse. Find out more in this guide from Streaming Media: From StreamingMedia.com

This tutorial will take a look at how we can add clickable calls-to-action to the YouTube platform.

Welcome to this tutorial series on adding interactivity into some popular online video players. This is part one of two, and will cover YouTube interactivity. As video creators and publishers, it's important for us to create a great user experience for our viewers. Not only does that include producing a compelling video for our audiences, but also considering what happens after they're done watching our videos. There are some pretty cool interactive features that are built right into some of the more popular online video channels (Figure 1, below). Let's take a look at how we can add clickable call-to-actions to the YouTube platform. Figure 1. Calls-to-action in YouTube videos

YouTube’s Interactive Features

Starting with YouTube in the fully free account option, I fully recommend researching the YouTube help page to get a full overview on their interactive features (Figure 2, below). Cards and end screens are what we'll discuss in this tutorial. Both of these allow for publishers to create clickable callouts within a YouTube video. Figure 2. Researching Cards on the YouTube Help page These callouts can prompt your viewers to watch more of your videos, subscribe to your channel, and even go to an approved website (Figure 3, below). They also work on mobile devices, which is a huge improvement from YouTube's old interactive feature, called Annotations....read more