I’ve started uploading video content to YouTube and want to have the videos go live while I’m at work. Problem is, I can’t figure out how to schedule that without uploading them from work, which isn’t allowed. Help!
Props to you for recognizing that YouTube is indeed a huge piece of any modern marketing campaign. Depending on which analytics you believe, it’s either the #2 or #3 busiest sites on the entire Web (Facebook is #1). Even if it’s not for marketing and you’re just uploading cute cat videos (we do that too!) it’s fun to get lots of people to see the videos rather than just a half-dozen friends.
As you suspect, there are certain times of the day and days of the week that are better for having your video go live than others. 3am isn’t so good unless you have a product for insomniacs, for example, and a video about how to avoid being ripped off for concert tickets is going to be more popular at 7pm on a Friday than 8:30am on a Monday morning. Then again, we’re just talking about when it “goes live” for your channel subscribers, once it’s live, it’ll stay live until you change its status. A good title, description and keywords can go a long way towards maximizing its long term visibility, of course!
There’s also a weird nuance with scheduling your posts too because once it starts uploading, if it’s marked to go Public (the default) then you can’t change that to Scheduled. So your best bet is to go to the upload page, change the default to Unlisted, then begin the upload.
If you can’t change it, you’ll still see “Scheduled” on the menu, you just won’t be able to choose it!
But let’s start at the beginning. Here’s a typical video upload screen as my video’s mostly uploaded. Pay attention to the menu on the top right:
You can see that we missed the window with this upload: because it defaulted to Public I don’t even see Scheduled as an option on the privacy menu. Bah!
Other times you’ll see it but it’ll be greyed out, as you can see here:
The solution is to ensure that you mark your video as Unlisted before you begin the upload and you can avoid all this hassle! Here’s what I mean:
That’s the ticket!
Once you remember to do that prior to your upload, you can then choose Scheduled and set the time and date as desired:
Easy enough. Now when the video is fully uploaded, it doesn’t immediately go live but instead goes into the publishing queue on YouTube itself, as the email reminds you:
That’s all there is to it. When the time rolls around, your video will go live and people will have no idea whether you uploaded it minutes, hours or even days earlier.
Note that not everyone on YouTube has access to the scheduler, it’s apparently only available to people who have at least one monetized video that’s live on their channel. So if you really want this and don’t have it as a feature, mark one of your videos as okay for monetization and you should be good to go with the scheduler. And who knows, maybe you’ll make a few bucks too!
Finally, you can find me on YouTube as channel AskDaveTaylor. Why not subscribe today?
thanksd