He hit publish at eight in the evening and sat in the same chair for a full hour refreshing the page. Seven views, then fourteen, then thirty.
The next day a viewer wrote: "the subtitles did not show for me." He opened the video and found the subtitle file had never uploaded. And in the description a link was missing a character so it would not open. And the first comment was a real question left unanswered for two days.
The hour he spent watching added not one view, and the ten minutes he did not spend checking cost him three mistakes.
The first hour is for checking and replying, not watching
In the first hour you can affect two things only: the video's soundness, and the first comments. Everything else is entirely outside your hands.
So the hour runs like this: ten minutes checking, twenty minutes replying, then closing.
A ten-minute checklist
Do it in the same order every time:
1. Open the video from another account or a private window. This step catches the most common mistakes: a video left private, or restricted, or unavailable in some countries.
2. Look at the thumbnail on the home page rather than in the dashboard. Confirm it appeared, that it is the one you meant, and that its text reads at small size.
3. Turn on the subtitles and confirm they uploaded and are in sync. The most repeated mistake, because the upload happens as the last step while you are tired.
4. Click every link in the description. One broken link looks like carelessness, and fixing it after an hour is cheaper than after a week.
5. Listen to the first twenty seconds on a phone earpiece rather than your good headphones. If you cannot hear the speech, the problem is in your levels rather than the viewer's device.
6. Check the end screen and cards if you use them: do they point at the video you intended?
And add to the list any mistake you have made once, because this list grows with you and becomes an immunity.
The next twenty minutes: comments
The first comments matter more than the rest, for two reasons: they stay at the top, and whoever arrives later reads them before watching.
Three things to do:
1. Pin a comment. One sentence with something useful in it: a question for the audience, a correction of something you forgot, or a link to the video that follows this one.
2. Reply properly to the first five comments. Not with a like. A reply in the first hour is seen by far more people than a reply three days later.
3. Answer the first question, however simple, because your answer becomes the reference for everybody who asks the same thing after.
What not to look at in the first hour
- View count. In the first hour it is the number of subscribers who happened to be online, not a performance indicator.
- Click-through rate. It needs a large sample before it means anything.
- The retention curve. It needs more views to settle.
- A comparison with a previous video at the same hour. The publishing hour and the day of the week differ, and comparison at this stage misleads.
And what deserves attention after two days rather than after an hour, and how to read performance and turn it into ideas, is in after publishing: how to read your video's performance and feed it back into your ideas.
When changing something is justified
The title: do not change it in the first hour unless it contains a clear error. After two days, if the video is reaching people and they are not opening it, the title can be adjusted once. And what makes a title get opened at all is in writing the title and description.
The thumbnail: the same rule, and once rather than three times.
The description: fix it immediately if it has an error, because editing a description harms nothing.
The video itself: do not delete and re-upload over a small mistake. You lose everything in exchange for a correction nobody notices.
What to do if you find a serious mistake
An error in a fact, a sentence that wrongs somebody, or a shot that should not have gone out. You have three moves depending on the size:
An error in a fact: pin a comment with the correction and add a line at the top of the description. That is enough in most cases and reads as integrity rather than weakness.
A mistake concerning a person: unlist the video immediately, contact them, then decide.
A mistake that ruins the whole video: delete it in the first hour rather than the next day. In the first hour the number who saw it is small, and deleting is cheap.
Close the page
After thirty minutes, close it. And this is not only advice about your peace of mind but about your schedule: the hour you spend watching is an hour of the next video.
And give yourself a written rule: two times a day to look at numbers, midday and evening, and closed in between. Somebody who can do that makes more videos; somebody who cannot makes a figure to follow.
And if the video moves more than usual
If in the first hours the video looks to be taking far more than its norm, there is a different plan that starts then and runs a week, and it is in the video that took off: what do you do in the seven days after.
A publishing ritual in three lines
Write these three lines in a file and keep them in front of you every time you publish:
Ten minutes: open from another account, check the thumbnail, subtitles, links and audio.
Twenty minutes: pin a comment and reply to the first five.
Then close, and come back to the numbers in two days.
Thirty organised minutes are worth a whole night of refreshing, and they make every video you publish cleaner than the one before it.