When creating a YouTube video as part of a video marketing plan, choosing your thumbnail is very important. Far too many people overlook this very important step. Think about it for a minute: how often can you remember seeing a video in your feed or in search and you were not going to click on it but then you saw the thumbnail image and you wanted to see more?
This happens every day and if you’re putting intriguing thumbnails up with your videos, then that will be your video that people are stopping to click on, rather than passing it up.
Thumbnails can also make a difference in how many views you are getting. Learn more about getting YouTube views here. When you have a creative, interesting or even slightly risqué thumbnail, people want to click to see more. Just be sure you don’t deceive the people by making the still something that has nothing to do with the video.
Trust me, people have done this before and it makes YouTubers mad.
Instead, you want to use thumbs that are about what the video is about. YT makes this easy because you get the option to choose thumbnails when uploading your video. The problem is that most people don’t even bother to change the default. It might be a weird corner of the main shot or something else odd or obsolete that will not get the viewer’s attention at all. You have the opportunity to pick from different freeze frames.
However, when the thumbnail options given automatically are dumb or pointless, this might be a good time to upload a custom thumb instead. You can learn how to make cool video thumbnails from a video on YouTube. How cool is that?
The thumbnail is what many people look at when scanning videos to decide if they want to watch them or not. You want to be sure you give them something that captures their eye as they scan. No matter what the topic of your video, you can try harder and come up with a great thumbnail. Taking that extra time to get a great image can mean the difference between missing out on tons of views and having a very popular video.
Do you have any guidelines or hints for choosing a thumbnail image? Is there anything that you do to help you pick the perfect thumb or have you just been using the default all this time?
