How to Manage YouTube Playlists

When creating playlists for your YouTube channel, don’t hold back. A well-organized channel is a useful channel, giving viewers the option (and the motivation) to stick around longer, browse related videos, and get more interested in your brand. Based on our research of over 3,500 businesses who use YouTube, we found that the most successful channels have five times as many playlists as the least successful.

Keep in mind that you can also include other users’ videos in your playlists. This can be a good way to engage your community. For example, if your business is a pharmaceutical company, you might want to include a playlist of carefully curated videos of people speaking about a relevant illness.

Incorporate playlists into your marketing campaigns and use them as a way to group related content, saving your viewers time filtering through other content that might impede a call-to-action. Both Google and YouTube recognize a hot playlist, which will help your search marketing efforts.

Follow these steps to create and edit playlists on YouTube:

1. Sign into your YouTube account and click on your username in the upper right corner of the page. Click Video Manager on the drop-down menu that appears.
2. Select Playlists from the vertical navigation menu on the left, click the New button, and type a title and description for your playlist. Don't worry, you can always edit these later. Click Create Playlist. (Please note that if you don't have any playlists yet, the Playlists and New buttons might appear in a slightly different location than if you already have playlists.)
3. The Edit Playlist options will come up. For marketing videos, you most likely want your playlist to be public, and you should allow embedding, liking, and disliking for maximum engagement. You won’t be able to choose the playlist thumbnail until after adding one or more videos. The Delete Playlist button is also on this page if you ever need it.
4. You can add videos in several ways: On the Edit Playlist page, you can copy the URL into the designated spot after clicking Add Video by URL. Just paste the URL of your video (or someone else’s) and hit Add. Keep an eye out for the Add to button that appears below videos throughout the site. You can click this to gain access to a dropdown menu of all of your playlists, as well as your Watch Later and Favorites lists. Throughout the site, video thumbnails have a plus button that appears in the lower right corner of the thumbnail when you hover over it. This brings up the same menu of options as the aforementioned Add to button.
5. Now that you’ve added some videos to your playlist, it’s time to go back to Edit Playlist and choose a thumbnail. Just click the round circle next to your favorite thumbnail. (Choose a close-up of a face or recognizable object if possible.)
6. Re-order and remove videos if you’d like. Use the icons on the left to move things around and the ‘x’ button on the right to delete videos.
7. Including videos from other users? You can use the ‘notes’ feature to write anything you’d like - your own short description of the video, why you’re including it in your playlist, etc. This will be publicly viewable.