YouTube Card: How to Build Your Fanbase using YouTube Cards

YouTube Cards are a new mobile-friendly YouTube interactivity feature that will replace annotations in the future.  This can be a great tool to help you increase your fanbase. If you rely on using annotations, no need to worry.  YouTube claims they wont phase out annotations until cards can do everything that annotations did…and more.

• These YouTube cards look good, and still appear in the video.
• You can customize each card and add a call-to-action as well as a title and image
• The branding watermark on your channel will not appear in the lower right corner of the video so it doesn’t compete with cards
• You can check a card’s performance in YouTube Analytics….and much more

Check out 1:06 and 1:40 in the video above to see the YouTube cards in action.

Here are the six current card types you can add to your videos now:

1) Merchandise card–

This is similar to merchandise annotations, and they can promote a creator’s licensed merchandise directly from the video, so this is a great way to get visibility to your bandmerchandise you want to sell. Important Note: iTunes is not supported on Android , so merchandise cards that link to iTunes will not be shown on Android devices.

2) Fundraising Card–  This is similar to fundraising annotations, and these cards can link viewers directly to projects that appear on whitelisted fundraising sites.  This can be used to raise funds through direct fan contributions AND crowdfunding sources.

3) Video or playlist card– This card can link to a public YouTube video or playlist which may be interest to the person viewing the current video.  This is great for driving video and playlist views to get more website traffic to your bands website.

4) Associated website card– This is set up to link directly to the website you have associated from your card. This can be a great tool for announcing tour dates or new album releases when linking to your website, and building your email list.

5) Fan Funding Card– This lets  your fans show their support to you and your music by making a monetary contribution directly on the video page.