How to create curated YouTube videos for your community

Content creation is one of the most difficult parts of growing a new community. Usually, you as community owner do not create the own videos. It's a question of how much time it takes to create high-quality video content. You would not consistently publish video content every week with the hopes of generating likes and subscribers, and hope they would convert into new community members.

At the same time, the community owners and members typically find helpful videos and post them in forum without any encouragement. 

Good news: There's an easy way to use YouTube to grow your community content without creating videos. You and your members can just embed and share existing YouTube content on your site. 

Your members already use the embed feature to post YouTube videos in the forum posts. However, to find all them at once, rate and comment at the dedicated place is almost impossible. The concept is to curate YouTube videos, organizing them for optimal community user experience, while doing write-ups to provide added value and capture search traffic. 

With FX Pages Videos templates you will easily create a video section within the community and integrate it nice in your discussion threads, allowing commenting, reacting, rating, using pre-moderation, synchronizing to your forums and even more.

To make it even easier for your members, add YouTube API to pull the video title, description and thumbnail while submitting a video link on the fly.

Let’s take a look at what the curated YouTube content is and how to use it wisely in your community.

What is curated YouTube content?

You've found really cool YouTube videos concerning your community subject, but they are not your own. The idea here is that you add a video section to your community that profiles and curates YouTube content. Your community organizes this video content and provides tight integration, allowing reactions and comments.

There are different directions you could go:

• YouTube News: latest reports on your subject
• YouTube Curation: a collection of the best resources for your community
• YouTube Profiling: profile the top YouTubers channels and playlists

The beauty of this approach is that 75% of the content work is already done for you. You (and later your community members) will feature existing content (YouTube videos) and create a 300+ word description that is a helpful and informative write-up to supplement  the video.

Initially, you are going to find the best videos, add them to your community, write some words about them and encourage discussion. You are curating videos from YouTube and using them as the subject for your new community topics.

Instead of spending hours researching and compiling resources to find new ideas for your topics, you use videos and simply summarize the main points. It is such an easy way to start viable discussions.

The benefits of curated and shared video content 

You know YouTube as the world's biggest video streaming website. But it's also the second-largest search engine on the web. People around the world collectively spend more than 1 billion hours every day consuming content on YouTube. Every minute, more than 500 hours of new video content is uploaded to YouTube.

That's a lot of fresh, unique, well-researched content you can simply use to create new topics for our community.

The discussions about the videos enable you to get search engine traffic. Plus, third-party video content is a no-cost resource that enables you to cheaply produce compelling content. The point is to rank for some interesting long-tail keywords from video content you didn't even create!

The author of the video has already done research on the topic. You just need to use it to create a written piece of content for your site. Embedding videos on your community will also help you increase the average time a user spends on your community. This has a direct impact on several website performance metrics, reduces your site's bounce rates, drives more clicks to your internal links, and improves your community's rankings.

The community below went from 1.5 minutes of session duration to almost 4 minutes. The number of pages per session has tripled since the curated YouTube content section has been started. In just one month.

Here are some of the greatest benefits of curated YouTube content in a nutshell:

• You can take advantage of existing content, just look for the best
• YouTube is one of the top social media platforms, the content is endless, everyone knows it
• Featuring YouTube's content will increase session duration time on your community
• Discussions about the videos will drive traffic from search engines
• Member sharing YouTube videos in your community can help you convert website visitors into members

What kind of content can you feature using the video section on your community? Let’s take a look.

Create community content by curating YouTube videos (Example)

Before your members start to share and comment on videos, you have to find and add some videos yourself. This way you produce your first content and show your members how the section can be used to share the best video resources.

Now imagine that I am going to write a tutorial on something like how to create a homepage for the community.

If I were to write this completely on my own from scratch, I would have to do a fair bit of research, digging through various docs and tutorials and reading tons of blogs. I would have to decide what features should be included. After I have done, I would have to create screenshots, a demo page, a video tutorial, and write documentation for it.

Let’s see how much easier this can be with YouTube curation. Doing a search for "Invision Community" on YouTube brought back a bunch of results. While researching, I have found a video of how to create a homepage in under 5 minutes. 

I have watched the video and written down the key points I have seen. Then I have structured them and extended with my own thoughts. It’s clearly a topic that's perfect for my community audience, and one that's I see in my search statistics fairly regularly. The video is only 6 minutes long, but after a minute into it and I could see that this is going to turn into a 300+ word description.

View the result of this example:

Use the YouTube videos to write a high-quality content

Your users would normally just add a link to your community. Sharing a link is easy. Only a few of them would write well content for it. This is where your curation part starts.

Set the video resources to be pre-moderated before they are visible to the community. Then watch and edit the video submitted by user.

Optimize the video title

Re-write the video title into one that's more search engine friendly. Leave only main keywords in, while targeting essential keywords. In my example above, the video is called Video Tip: Create a homepage in under 5 minutes using Pages. I have turned it into a question, added a strong search word tutorial, deleted Pages as too specific, and added community for my target audience.

Extract the main points and create a brief outline

The best part about YouTube curation is that you don't have to sit there and come up with an outline for your content. That's one of the most dreadful parts of the writing process: figuring out what to write about.

Here, we already know what we're going to write about: whatever's being explained in the video. For my example, I have watched the video and listed out step by step the features I see in the video. Then turned them into description combining my point of views and structuring what I've seen.

Don't forget to see the comments on the video, if there are any. Most YouTube video comments are not valuable from a content creation perspective. However, the popular videos that describe products, services or include step-by-step guidelines often have comments full of questions, feedback, and other valuable tips.

Study the comments on the video and see if there are any points that you can include and answer in the description of the video. It will make your content much more valuable for the community members. 

If the video has step-by-step instructions on doing something, turn them into a bulleted list or if it's a long process, write it under several subheadings. You can even use screenshots and images wherever necessary to make your description more engaging.

If the video mentions any stats or research, try to find sources and link them in your article.

You do not have to limit your content to just the video. You can expand the points and make them more comprehensive. Ask your members what do they think about it. 

Get long tail keywords' traffic from Google with ease

In this way, you can tap into massive keyword search volume for both YouTube and non-YouTube-related queries. It will be a solid traffic acquisition strategy if the curation model is what primarily appeals to you. 

This method of content creation is a huge time saver, and allows you to create highly discussable topics. It also gives a possibility to your members to share something, they like. After the content is published, they get satisfaction, likes, points or what you have set up to award your members.

It helps you also to see number of view on your community, reactions and some other awesome indicators to tell you what's interesting for your members and what not.

Share your thoughts with us

Do you like the idea? Do you have a dedicated video section in your community? If not, why? If yes, how does it perform? Do you miss something in IPS on video presentation and functionality? Drop a line, I am curious about your comments.