5 Tips to Design the Best YouTube Channel Page

If you create and share your own videos on YouTube, then you've already taken the first step in putting your face out there. But there's another way to put your best face forward: Craft your channel page. Though your channel's landing page might appear simple (and it's grown simpler over the years), there are a number of features you can fine-tune to optimize a viewer's experience. You can't customize like you used to, and there's a lot of white space, but there are very specific ways to make your page stand out. Read on to find out how you can turn curious viewers into devoted subscribers.

Do you have any tips for boosting your YouTube profile? Let us know in the comments.

1. Post a great channel trailer.

 As soon as visitors land on your page, you want to hook them. A channel trailer is a great way to do it. You'll want something brief, attention-grabbing and representative of the kind of content you post. Don't tell people what you do — show them.

As the first piece of content some will see, the trailer is also a good place to plant the seed for subscribing. Get a quick line in there asking viewers to hit "subscribe." But do it subtly.

2. Optimize your channel name and description. 

Remember that your channel name and description won't just appear on your homepage. Your channel will appear in searches and suggested channel categories across YouTube, so make sure it's appealing. Note that your channel name isn't the same as your URL; you can change the former without affecting the latter.

As you write your channel description, it's good to think about how it will appear across the site and around the web. You'll need a description that highlights your most important content right up front.

3. Pick the right icon. 

The key here is to select something that will look good at very small resolutions. It's not like choosing your Facebook or Twitter profile photo; first of all, this is about branding. Your friends don't care that much if your photo is recognizable, or if it's even of you. But in the age of short attention spans, this tiny piece of real estate is your best bet for pulling viewers to your channel page.

4. Make beautiful channel art. 

Again, it's important to consider where your content will be seen other than your channel page. Or in this case, how it will be seen. You'll have viewers on desktops, tablets, laptops, phones, televisions and whatever new format comes out next week. That means you need to optimize your image to look great on every platform.

YouTube recommends the dimensions 2560x1440 px. Check out its image guidelines to see how your art will be cropped across different platforms (who will be seeing what). Here's the full art for Mashable's YouTube channel page. Note that only the illustrated band in the center of the image is visible on desktop.

When you're drafting the art, try to give the viewer something to connect to beyond a brand or a logo. If you want to throw your pretty face in there, do so. YouTube lists GoPro and Epic Meal Time as well-designed channel pages.

5. Maintain your feed. 

As a content creator, you'll want to keep your loyal subscribers entertained. If you don't upload on a weekly schedule, the feed can give you the appearance of being active. A default feed will include your uploads, videos you have liked, videos you added to playlists and channels to which you subscribe. 

You can adjust your sharing settings if you don't want to flood your subscribers with updates. But you can also approach it strategically: You might only want to like certain videos or comment on content on certain days of the week, for instance.

Homepage image courtesy of Flickr, Jo Nakashima

Exclusive: Pandora Deepens Its Integration With Facebook

It’s easier than ever to share what you’re listening to on Pandora with your Facebook friends, thanks to an extended partnership between the two companies.

Starting Wednesday, the songs and stations you listen to, as well as the tracks you give a "thumbs up," can be shared directly to Facebook. Details about your activity on Pandora, when shared via the social network, is then aggregated and displayed as part of the music section on your Facebook profile.

Pandora already supported sharing individual pieces of content to Facebook and Twitter. The new integration is the product of a year-and-a-half-long conversation between Facebook and Pandora.

“We’ve been talking to Facebook about how best to embrace this idea of what they call Timeline Apps — 'How do you make it really, really easy for people to update their Facebook identity as they consume content around the Internet and on mobile?'” Tom Conrad, Pandora's chief technology officer, told Mashable.

“Our frame in the conversation with them has always been, ‘How do we embrace this technical opportunity in a way that drives real value for both Pandora listeners and for Facebook users?”


Facebook’s recent Timeline update, as well as its music section, compelled Pandora to pursue deeper integration, Conrad added. Users are now able to seamlessly stream all their activity on Pandora to Facebook through an opt-in program. They can choose to send all data about their Pandora activity, or just a bit of their musical history (e.g. songs you give a "thumbs up"), to the social network.

Shared activity will appear in the Activity Log and the Music section of users' Facebook profiles, as well as on their friends' News Feeds based on Facebook’s algorithm.

“Seeing an ever-updating ticker of what my friends are listening to — what all of my friends are listening to — is less interesting than coming to understand the musical identity of a subset of the people that I interact with on Facebook,” Conrad explained.

Facebook's News Feed algorithm focuses on friends that users regularly interact with. That functionality extends to Pandora’s Facebook integration as well, so they won't suddenly have a News Feed filled with Pandora posts from all their high-school friends. In essence, it's a Facebook-curated feed that is limited only to people that a user is interested in hearing about.

When sharing isn't desired, a prominent toggle button within Pandora allows incognitio listening. This may be enforced, for example, when a user is listening to a holiday-themed radio station, but doesn't want to broadcast those details to their friends.

Intended to enhance the Pandora experience rather than invade privacy, Conrad said the service will be reaching out and educating its users about the new feature, explaining how to opt in, and how to control what data (if any) gets sent to Facebook.

Pandora’s new Facebook integration is live now.

What Pandora activity will you share on Facebook? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of Pandora; Mashable composite: Headphone image via iStockphoto, oonal; Facebook graphic via iStockphoto, pressureUA

Google Hangouts App: One Giant Leap for Chat Kind

Hands up if you've ever been in this situation: You start a conversation with a friend or family member at your desk on Instant Messenger. Away from your desk, you send them a text. Later on, you decide it makes more sense to speak face-to-face on Skype.

All of a sudden, you've got a balkanized conversation. And it's far, far worse if you're trying to involve multiple people. You quickly get to the point where you can't remember who said what to whom on what service on what device.

Wouldn't it be easier if it was all unified — if there was one conversation app to rule them all, on PC, tablet and mobile? Where you could pick up the conversation whenever, no matter what the platform, no matter what the year?

Guess Who?

Google has long been in a perfect position to dominate the realm of chat. The Hangouts service is the gold standard of video messaging. It's incredibly easy to add up to 10 people to a chat, and more importantly, to do fun stuff with them — share your screen, watch a video together, even wear silly hats and disguises.

Never has a more powerful piece of face-recognition tech been used for a more whimsical purpose. Google understands that wherever groups gather for social reasons, they need something to do. You need conversation pieces. You need the fun stuff. (In that vein, the company has created 850 new hand-drawn emoji for Hangouts' text chat feature.)

I've tried chatting with my family on Skype and iChat; both tend to slow down or break down, and a pleasant conversation devolves into a tech-support session. Google Hangouts just work. (Well, nine times out of 10 ain't bad.)

Until the company launched a standalone Google Hangouts app Wednesday, it was easy to be unaware of your option to Hangout on mobile. This was because you had to do it via the Google+ app. Mountain View doesn't miss an opportunity to push its social network on you. And that kept a whole load of less tech-savvy users — read, parents — at bay.

But to Google's credit: Now that it has decided to push Hangouts as a standalone service, it's pushing its capabilities to the limit. Facebook has chat heads; Google just vaulted to the head of the chat world. All that's missing is SMS and iMessage integration. But it's already starting to look like those services, at least.

Paradigm Shifts

Take a look at any SMS conversation. Your stream of texts with a given person never stops. The conversation may be infrequent, but it can go on forever. It thinks of chat as an infinite scroll.
It's odd that one of the creakiest chatting technologies in the world — plain old SMS, invented in 1992 — showed the way to the future of chat, but this is what seems to have happened. Facebook Messages picked up on the text-stream idea a while back. By adding video and photos, Google just leap-frogged them.
Now Hangouts never end; they just pause. The video chats live on, their times recorded, in a stream of communication. In this stream, you'll find seamless integration of Gchat messages. You can be chatting via Hangout on your iPhone, and what you just said will instantly pop up in your Gmail window.

You can share photos, and know they'll always be there in the social stream of your Hangout with a particular person at a particular time. This means the Hangouts app constitutes a credible alternative to Flickr, Instagram or Path; it's easier to find your photos if you remember who you sent them to.
(Sure, the photos technically live on Google+, but you can safely ignore that fact.)

On Hangouts for the iPhone, you can switch back and forth between video and Gchatting (or Google Talking, or whatever you want to call it). Which means Google just did an end-run around one Apple product — FaceTime — while also making irrelevant many IM apps in the Apple ecosystem. My favorite was IMO; now I have to consider whether I'll ever be using that app again.

Of course, you can probably guess the downside to all this. Say it with me now:

Privacy Problem

Remember how you could go off the record in Gchat? Well, you can still do that, but you can no longer make it the default for every chat. A tiny note on a support page was added Wednesday, and it said this:

We've made a change to the Google Chat and Google Talk chat history settings. You can turn individual chats off the record, but you'll no longer have the option to make chatting off the record the default setting for all of your chats.

Google, it seems from this typically roundabout way of delivering controversial feature changes, wants to nudge you into having a recorded history. It encourages you to see the Hangout as a softer, more social kind of stream — almost like Facebook Timeline.

What do you think? Will you download the app? How will you use it? Let us know in the comments.

Image via Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Instagram Introduces Photo Tagging

Instagram is rolling out an update which allows iOS and Android users to tag their friends, themselves, celebrities or brands in their photos – a similar feature to that which helped popularise Facebook in its early days. Previously, users had to ‘@’ mention their friend’s in the comments section accompanying photos if they wanted to tag them.

When a user is tagged in a photo they will receive a notification and the photo will appear in the “Photos of You” section of their profile. Like Facebook, users can detag themselves and change the settings so that photos require approval before they appear on their profile.

Having uploaded a photo, users will be given the option to tag people or brands by tapping on them. There is also the option to tag old photos. To see who’s tagged in any photo in their feed users just have to tap the photo, otherwise the tags remain invisible. Only the user who uploaded the photo can tag it, confirmed Instagram in their announcement post:

Today, we’re excited to introduce Photos of You and bring you a new way to share and discover stories on Instagram. When you upload a photo to Instagram, you’re now able to add people as easily as you add hashtags. Only you can add people to your photos, so you have control over the images you share. And it doesn’t stop at people—you can add any account on Instagram, whether it’s your best friend, favorite coffee shop or even that adorable dog you follow.
The benefits of the new tagging feature are obvious: users will be able to collate photo albums of themselves and flick through those of their friends. More importantly, it will be easier to capture and organise special moments with friends, making the photos simpler to rediscover in the future. Brands will also greatly benefit from the photos, as the public will be creating hundreds of great images featuring their logos and products which could then be used for promotional material.

Problems could arise for brands and celebrities, however, as every single photo they are tagged in will appear on their page or, if they select the image pre-approval option, they will have to sift through dozens of images, requiring time and effort. Also, there could be people taking photos which contain negative or inappropriate themes within them. Of course, companies could use this to their advantage, using positive and negative photos for sentiment analysis.

An Instagram spokesperson told TechCrunch that “a year of work went into building the new tagging and Photos Of You section”. The Photos Of You section won’t be published until May 16th, giving users enough time to get to grips with the new tagging feature, as well as to decide what tagged photos of themselves they want to be visible to the public. According to the same spokesperson, Instagram has not thought much about how to monetise the tagging feature yet. However, tagging will undoubtedly increase Instagram’s active user figures, as people will want to see photos that they are tagged in after receiving a notification.

What do you think of Instagram’s new tagging service?