YouTube Hashtags — Why It Might Not Make Sense to Marketers
The next time you log onto YouTube from your mobile phone or desktop you might come across something unusual. Some might ignore it and some might not even spot it. But if paid enough attention you’ll find something very familiar that most social media channels use. Still don’t get it? YouTube has officially introduced hashtags to its video titles. Search for any topic in the search bar with or without “#” and wait for the results to line up. At the first glance the hashtags aren’t visible but just look above the title of the video once you click a video to play.
YouTube has always been on top of its game in adopting new formats and embracing a variety of features such as HDR, 8K, VR and 60fps formats way before the majority of users were able to adopt and accept them, let alone record them. YouTube has been introducing newer trends and ways for your videos to be discovered over the last few months. Earlier this year even LinkedIn released its hashtags features to its power users and later enforced it onto every other user forcing them to select the kind of hashtags they’d like to follow or keep a track of.
You won’t be finding these hashtags on all the videos since the creators of the videos need to update their titles and descriptions with relevant hashtags.
It’s a deliberate attempt by YouTube to strengthen its search algorithm. However, it clearly is visible that YouTube’s version of the hashtag fails to function and make sense in the same way that we understand hashtags on every other social media website — and it’s also a huge annoyance that totally disrupts the natural order of the internet.
How to Add Hashtags to Your Videos
Based on this new update, YouTube will take the top three hashtags that a YouTuber posts in their video description, and you’ll be able to see those hashtags prominently right above the video’s title, serving it as a sort of categorization system.
- Hashtags in the title and description will be hyperlinked.
- If there are no hashtags in the title, the first three hashtags in the description will show above the video title.
Users can click on hashtags that appear in your video title, above your video title or in the description to go to that hashtag’s search results page to see related videos.
How YouTube Search Works
YouTube’s search engine works like any other search engine that there is. Like Google, Facebook and Instagram it also has a basic framework of search algorithm which develops dynamically upon how users search the video.
One key point to remember is that YouTube is not in the business of rating whether your video is good or bad. Instead, YouTube’s ranking algorithm totally focuses on how the viewers interact with videos, using artificial intelligence and machine learning that “learns from over 80 billion bits of feedback from the daily viewers to understand how to serve the right videos to the right viewers at the right time.”
In broad terms, that viewers feedback includes:
- What they do (and don’t) watch
- Watch Time — How much time they spend watching a video
- Session Time — How much time they spend watching videos during each visit
- Likes, dislikes, and ‘not interested’ feedback
Reasons Why It Might Not Make Sense to the Marketers
The problem with YouTube hashtags and the reason why the original announcement didn’t excite its users so much is that the hashtags don’t really function on YouTube the way they do Twitter.
In fact, when former Google developer Chris Messina posted the first hashtag on Twitter in 2007,
It was a way to keep track of all the conversations happening on the platform that surrounded an issue or an event by giving people a unique keyword to search.
Twitter then added hyperlinks to its hashtags in late 2009, as it marked the official beginning of the widespread embrace of the symbol. Instagram and Facebook also followed the hashtags in 2011, and 2013 respectively. By clicking on a hashtag on any of those services, and you’ll find recent public posts, photos, videos, and other shared links surrounding a particular event or an issue.
And today YouTube is a decade late to the party. Although, this isn’t even YouTube’s biggest problem with hashtags. The problem is that YouTube is completely changing the purpose of hashtags and how they function.
Yes, a hashtag is essentially a search function, but there’s a big difference between the results you receive when clicking a hashtag on other social sites and when you search for a term on YouTube.
Reasons why it won’t help:
- Inconsistency in Search — Since YouTube has asked the users to use hashtags in the title and description, it can manipulate the search results minimizing the query-to-result score. For example, we still don’t know what is the difference between hashtags in the title and the description. Will the hashtag in title rank higher? Clicking on a YouTube hashtag will only pull up the uploaded videos that have the hashtag in their descriptions. If a popular YouTuber is an expert in a particular subject matter on the platform, a good chunk of the results you’ll find are those particular user’s videos.
- Manipulating Search Results — When a user searches for, say #video which is very generic and is not specific but is incorporated in the title and description. Its own search algorithm views hashtags. A “#keyword” returns different search results than just “keyword. The query sends gazillions of videos with #video. This practice will definitely lead and disrupt the healthy practice of SEO on YouTube.
But one thing is for sure that the hashtag that we all know and are used to simply does not work on YouTube as we expect it to. While this feature is still new and in its nascent stage and still needs to be explored, it’ll be interesting to see how marketers adapt to this. Either YouTube will address the current issues with hashtags on its platform or the latest feature signals YouTube will just do things differently.
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