Initial Findings: How to make an engaging video?

This past week, I created two YouTube videos using the tips that I found through researching ways to make engaging videos. I focused on making my videos short, visually stimulating, and cohesive. However, this process was more challenging than I predicted it would be. Some challenges that I came across were my SD not being able hold storage for the video I wanted to film and my computer not having a place to insert SD cards. I solved these problems by buying a new SD with more memory and by using my old laptop that has an SD reader to edit the video. The videos I created were about how to apply to teacher's college and my reaction to getting accepted to Teacher's College. Now, that the videos have been up for a week, I can look at the analytics to determine what worked and what didn't work. 

 

Things that worked: 

1) The tags: I tagged my videos so they could be found by my target audience which is people applying to teacher's college or teacher's canadiates. I know that I was successful because on my channel analytics is says that people were able to find my videos using these tags as search terms "OUAC", "College Decision Reaction", and "College Decision 2022". 

 2)Time-stamping: I put time stamps on my videos so that viewers could click through the video easier by using clicking the times in the caption. I know this worked because I can see an increase in engagement where my timestamps are placed on my audience analytics. 

 3)Community Engagement: Though this isn't a lot, I gained 1 subscriber from my video titled "How to Apply to Teacher's College in Ontario", which shows me that someone was interested in being apart of my online community and learning more about teacher's education. 

 4)Providing viewers with unique information: In my video titled "How to Apply to Teacher's College in Ontario", I gained audience attention when I began to offer viewers advice that you can't find in other videos or sites online. I talked about teacher subreddits that are super helpful and I offered advice on how to get answers about applications. This allowed me to put my own twist on the video and gain viewership.

Things that didn't work:

1)Keeping Audiences Attention: I can see in my analytics that there are some drops in audience retention throughout the video. Some of the main times I experience drops are when I talk too long about things that don't need an explaination. For example, in my "How to Apply to Teacher's College in Ontario" video, when I talked about how to apply on OUAC, I lost enagement and I think that is because applying on OUAC is common sense to many Ontarians. In my "Teacher's College Decision Reaction" video, I lost enagement when I began to react to schools that I didn't get accepted to. I think thats because it was more engaging for viewers to watch my positive reaction of getting accepted then my neutral reaction to my rejections. 

 2)Intro: My introduction was the first thing on each of my videos and I learned that this makes people bored because the viewer just wants to see the content. I can see this is true because there is a drop in both of my videos after the intro. Intro's don't add anything for the viewer. For this week, I would like to focus more on making videos that are able to sustain my viewers attention for longer, I think I will do this by, some suggestions online are removing an intro, leading people in with a hook, better audio quality, and show don't tell