If you’re a small business owner who’s taken on the challenge of doing your own digital marketing, there’s no doubt YouTube may be of interest to you. It’s a familiar platform for many people, and the viewership numbers are off the charts. This has been especially true during the pandemic when YouTube’s traffic was so heavy they were forced to reduce video quality in order to keep streaming to everyone who wanted to watch.

Understanding Chapters

The Chapters feature YouTube introduced allows a viewer to skip ahead to a pre-determined point in the video by tapping on a break in the video progress bar. When they tap that point, the Chapter title will be displayed. On mobile, Chapter breaks are also accompanied by a haptic buzz on devices that allow for this to happen.

Why Would You Want to Use Chapters?

Chapters are designed to allow viewers to skip ahead to the parts that are of most interest to them. Therefore, you want to organize your chapters in a way that makes sense. For a how-to video, it makes sense to have a chapter for each step in the process. If you’re explaining how to do a variety of things, such as baking ten different types of cookies, it makes sense that every cookie has its own Chapter. Knowing the Chapters option exists can help DIY marketers structure their videos more effectively; additionally, it’s a way to present longer videos with confidence.

For a video to receive Chapter breaks, it must have at least 3 content sections that are each at least 10 minutes long. At this point, the Chapters feature isn’t being automatically applied. Instead, you need to manually enter the relevant time stamps and chapter titles when you upload the video. After you do this, the Chapter feature scrapes the video’s metadata to make everything work.

Overall, the introduction of Chapters is a very subtle change to the way YouTube works. Many users will adopt it without even noticing it hasn’t always been there. A few minutes spent including the chapter data when you upload your video will make your content easier to use and more appealing to viewers. It’s a good practice to be aware of when you’re trying to help your business grow.