In an earlier post, we spoke of the benefits of using YouTube to promote your business and how the only limits are your imagination and creativity. It is an essential tool top help you differentiate your business, especially if you are offering a service to the public, and you wish to keep your expenses down (i.e. save bandwidth from hosting the file on your servers). Once you have made you piece, either an informative piece about your service, a How-To video or some tips, the next goal, is to upload your video to YouTube. We don’t need to cover this here, because it’s easy to follow YouTube’s steps to do that. The real trick about video upload at YouTube is getting the right frame to appear as your screen capture in your listing. Like so:

Take a look at the video above. It shows the frame you would want if you had a restaurant: People having a good time. YouTube is very clear that you cannot choose your screen capture, but you can choose one of the three thumbnails determined by the system. In other words, if you do not plan it properly, YouTube decides which frames you have the choice to display. Taking the video example above, the three thumbnails we could choose from YouTube were the following:

These were not random frames captured. We planned it. And now you can too, with our new: Secret YouTube Screen Capture Formula Page. Just enter in the number of seconds your video is and you will be told which three areas in the video will become the three shots used as your screen capture option. The middle one (the second result) will be the default screen capture displayed once your video is uploaded. As mentioned, YouTube offers you the opportunity to select alternate frames as described here. Don’t leave any of this to chance especially after all the time you spent, both financially and creatively. Remember, the frame capture will be one of the single most compelling pieces leading people to press play. Think how often an appealing book cover or magazine cover leads us to pick it up and at least thumb its pages. This is the same idea. Make sure you capture the message you want rather than have it determined at random.

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Update

There seems to be a post at Will Video for Food that this method is being changed. We are not sure, but we will keep watching it and let you know.