Posted: September 12, 2013
You’ve sat through watching a 6-minute long Youtube video only to see the best part at the 5:42 mark. Now you want to share this part with your friends but not if they have to sit through the whole video or if you have to explain to them where the best part is. Alternatively, you’ve uploaded a video about your company’s products but want to link to specific times in the Youtube Description to make it easier for people to skip forward and back to view the different products.
There are a couple of simple tricks with Youtube that will allow you to achieve both of these.
The nice thing about the Ringo Ska album is there are links in the Youtube Description to each track, so you can listen to the ska version of Hey Jude over and over again.
To add a link in the Youtube Description field to a certain time in your video, all you need to do is put the time within brackets like (3:42). The link will automatically be created when you save the description field and when a user clicks it, the video will start at the 3-minute, 42-second mark.
To see a full example to start a video at the 35-second mark with a link in the Youtube Description, try copying and pasting the following into your the description field of one of your Youtube videos:
Start the Video at 35-seconds (0:35)
This can come in handy by optimizing your Youtube Descriptions by listing a number of highlights in the video and linking to them. In other words, you’re creating something like a table of contents that makes it easy for a user to jump to different, important sections of your video.
Now, let’s say we want to email or share a link to a Youtube video and we want that video to start at a specific time, we simply just need to add #t=1m47s to the end of the Youtube URL, where, in this example, the video would start at 1-minute and 47-seconds. For the full example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEjjzZzv0p4#t=1m47s
The emailing and sharing component of this is the biggest benefit as you can directly respond to a customer asking a question about your products and services with a link to an exact time in your Youtube video with the answer to their question. Or, maybe there’s a section of a video you want to promote to your Facebook followers, you can use this technique to share a URL that starts the video right where the useful information is.
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