With over a billion unique users visiting the platform each month, YouTube now acts as the second largest search engine, right after Google. This represents a great opportunity for businesses to expand their outreach, grow their online presence, build brand awareness, and generate more leads. However, marketing tactics need to be aligned with the platform’s major tendencies in order to be effective. So, here are some of the most important YouTube trends for 2022 and beyond that should be incorporated into SEO strategies for higher success:

1. YouTube shorts

Much like Instagram Stories, YouTube introduced Shorts relatively recently for marketing products, services, and content. These short videos have proved to be quite popular among audiences, as they’re not too wordy or lengthy. Shorts are a major YouTube trend at the moment that attracts plenty of attention. They might be particularly attractive to YouTubers and businesses attempting to market on this platform, as they allow individuals to promote interesting and unique content that easily grabs the attention of audiences and quickly converts leads, as long as base audiences are analyzed thoroughly beforehand.

2. Live streaming

Live streaming on YouTube can bring astonishingly high traffic to companies. People enjoy watching live streams that show or promote services that could benefit wide audiences, and they tend to watch live videos nearly every time they are streamed. This type of content can reach a significantly wider audience and even generate more views than typical YouTube videos. Using the YouTube Live feature, businesses can host product launches, hold interesting interviews with specialists, discuss key topics, and much more.

3. How-to videos

Although it might come as a surprise, how-to videos actually play an important role in maximizing viewer engagement and driving more traffic, likely due to the fact that they allow individuals to follow their preferred content. How-to videos have been an integral part of YouTube since the very beginning of this platform, but they have truly skyrocketed during the pandemic, as people seemingly love to watch videos that allow them to learn small to big things. These types of videos aren’t only beneficial to creators; how-to videos can offer plenty of benefits to marketers as well, enabling them to grow their audiences fast.

4. SEO tools

Another trend that has been dominating the website in recent months is the use of a specialized YouTube SEO tool that allows creators to optimize their videos and increase their views and followings. By providing a data-centric approach to strategy, this tool allows creators to find video ideas, generate tags, research keywords, optimize titles & descriptions, track rankings over time, and even audit channels for obvious issues. As a result, YouTube creators are able to beat their competition with effective SEO tactics, which is why this and similar tools will likely continue to grow in the future.

5. Audience-decided content

It wasn’t uncommon for YouTube creators to put out content their audiences either watched and connected with or missed entirely. This tactic proved to be quite difficult for creators to manage, as there was no easy formula for making viral content or predicting exactly which form of content would be consumed by viewers. In an effort to tackle this uncertainty, creators now ask their audiences which type of content they would like to watch, and then make content based on their preferences. This is another soaring YouTube trend where creators interact with their viewers before putting out content, mostly through comments, polls, and reviews.

6. Gaming

Gaming is rising in importance across sectors and platforms, and YouTube is no different. Gaming is an increasingly popular topic on YouTube that has drastically risen during the pandemic as well, and is another trend that is bound to increase as the number of interesting video games also continues to rise. Playtime, walk-throughs, commentary, and streaming are all popular video formats related to gaming, many of which can attract unusually high traffic, often in the hundreds of thousands of views. Clearly, the gaming industry represents a brilliant marketing opportunity, whether it be sponsorships or partnerships with gaming YouTubers.

7. 360-degree videos

As technology continues to advance, YouTube likes to follow. Even though 360-degree videos have been around for quite some time now, they’re experiencing newfound popularity in recent months, representing another important trend. These types of videos are immersive (or surround), offering views from every angle and direction. They are best experienced and initially meant for virtual reality (VR) headsets, but they can also be explored without any additional equipment. The flexibility and great potential of 360-degree videos have led to an important change in the world of marketing, enabling thorough examination of products and accelerating the growth of many brands.

8. Video chapters

Introduced to YouTube relatively recently, video chapters represent timestamps or segments within a video that enable viewers to skip to a specific part of the entire video. In other words, chapters allow audiences to skip the segments they don’t deem necessary or only watch the parts that interest them the most. Video chapters have managed to increase traffic tremendously due to their structure and effectiveness, especially when it comes to long-form videos that now provide perfectly divided sections. Chapters have truly taken the world of YouTube by storm, as they finally allow viewers to navigate through videos exactly how they want to.

There’s no denying that YouTube trends have a massive impact on audiences and businesses alike. Marketers and brands should take advantage of these tendencies and implement them into their strategies to increase their chances of success.