How to Use Wistia and YouTube Together

YouTube helps your videos get discovered, and Wistia gives you more control over your videos. So how can you use both video platforms together to get the best of both worlds?

It only takes four steps:

Step 1: Manage your entire video library through Wistia

Wistia is more than a hosting platform. It’s also a media management system.

By using Wistia as the home base for all your content, you can easily find videos, recut and edit them together, and collaborate with your wider team in the cloud. Plus, you can send videos to YouTube (and other platforms) with a couple of clicks.

It’s easier than using YouTube to store your videos. With YouTube, you’d have to download and re-upload anything every time you need to make a change, and it’s hard to keep everything secure while also sharing videos for feedback.

Sure, the catch is that Wistia isn’t free, but the $79/month Business Plan has more than enough storage for the vast majority of teams, even those putting out many new videos each week.

Step 2: Reserve YouTube for content that works on YouTube

YouTube rewards channels that consistently generate views on the platform. That means every video you post should be made for your YouTube audience specifically, whatever that looks like for your channel.

Using YouTube as storage for videos that weren’t built for that audience can hurt your standing with the algorithm and drive up unsubscribes. While some videos like sales videos, support videos, or courses may add value to a specific subset of your audience, they don’t hold mass appeal. They’re better off on Wistia.

A great YouTube channel is lean and mean. You want each video in your channel to attract and engage your YouTube audience further rather than putting them off. Find those videos in your Wistia content library and publish them to your YouTube channel.

There are broadly four ways YouTube users can find your videos, known as the 4S framework:

Subscribers

When people subscribe to your channel, they get your videos in their subscriber feed, via notifications, and highlighted to them on the YouTube homepage.

Users that have similar viewing patterns to your subscribers may get your videos highlighted to them via the YouTube homepage as well.

Suggested

YouTube suggests videos to viewers throughout its platform, most commonly on the sidebar and in the recommended links that appear after a video has finished playing.

Search

Videos appear ranking as results in response to queries in the search bar.

Shorts

Shorts appear to users within the Shorts feed, and views to longer-form videos come via related Shorts that act as teasers and trailers.

Every video you upload to YouTube should have a clear means of generating views from one of the above sources. It has to appeal to your subscribers, capture interest through a compelling proposition with the title or thumbnail, and/or be well optimized for YouTube search.

Step 3: Use Wistia to embed videos on your website

Wistia provides an embed code for each video in your content library. You just need to select an embed style and paste the code into your site.

Wistia is ideal for hosting videos on your website because:

• You can customize the player to match your brand, add in interactive elements, and get additional data on who has been watching your videos and how much they watched.
• Wistia embeds give you certain strategic SEO advantages over YouTube embeds. If a video is on both YouTube and embedded on your website with Wistia, you have the opportunity to get two listings in Google video search for any given query, thereby capturing more of the SERP real estate for video.
• Wistia embeds keep viewers on your site because they don’t include links away from your website. YouTube embeds act as leaky funnels sending users away from your site and onto YouTube with the player links and related video links.

Step 4: Bring YouTube viewers back to your site

YouTube is great for reach, but the conversions happen on your site. So the goal of every YouTube video should be to move interested viewers from YouTube.com to a page where a Wistia embed can take over.

To do that, use your YouTube videos to pitch exclusive content only available on your site, and then encourage viewers back to your website with end cards and description links. Once viewers land there, email collectors in your Wistia videos can capture them as leads, turning YouTube subscribers into prospective customers.

Wistia and YouTube provide the most value when used together, with the advantages and values of both platforms integrated into your overall video strategy. It’s not about pitching one against the other, but rather about using both effectively to deliver the most value.