How to add a subscribe button to a YouTube video

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, video producers, Web publishers.

If your nonprofit or social enterprise has a YouTube channel, and you have the occasion to edit videos for your organization, you’ll find this tutorial very useful.

I’ll assume you want to increase the number of people subscribing to your YouTube channel, right?

Getting subscribers’ attention while they’re watching

You already know how powerful timely call to actions can be in your emailing marketing, on Facebook news feeds and on your website. The same holds true for your YouTube videos.

Yes, people can subscribe to your YouTube videos at the top of your channel on YouTube. But prompting them to subscribe in the video itself gets their attention while they’re watching the video!

Creating calls to action with YouTube annotations

In an earlier article, my colleague Lauren Major explained how YouTube annotations work.

YouTube has a feature that allows publishers to annotate videos with text, notes and various links. And if you have access to video editing tools like iMovie or ScreenFlow (for Macs) or Camtasia (for PCs), you can kick things up a notch by adding a button to your annotation  (check out the end of this 55-second video for an example).

The video above shows you how to link a button in your video to an annotation on YouTube. Pretty cool, right? Do you ever do this?John Haydon delivers social web strategy solutions for “the quick, the smart, and the slightly manic.” Curious? Then visit the John Haydon blog, follow him on Twitter or leave a comment.