 Thank you for that warm welcome master of ceremony Asharani and my attend is today. You are here today to learn about social media. Many of you already might be having a YouTube channel for your club. If so, I hope you learn some few tips today. You might also be wondering, should I have a YouTube channel for my club? If you are in that bracket, I hope I can answer that question to you within the 15 minutes that have been allocated to me. So if you decide that you want to have a YouTube channel or if you already have a YouTube channel that you want to really revive, what is it that you need to do? I have a YouTube video channel called Tech for Toastmasters, but I won't be talking about it because that is mostly focused on training. But I want to today talk about clubs. How can a club leverage the use of YouTube for their PR activities? So YouTube as a PR tool, do any of you here have a YouTube channel for your club? Desert Pioneers. They have a channel, there are 171 subscribers looking at the content. What are they posting? Mostly they are meetings, two hours in length, promo videos. But mostly I see that they are posting their Toastmaster meetings. Anybody else has a channel Bahrain Advanced Toastmasters. Let's check 26 subscribers. So it looks like you have only a few videos. You started just eight months ago and you are also putting a lot of your club meetings on this channel. What you think is the attention span of an average person? How long can I hold your attention before you start looking at your WhatsApp messages or looking at some other things on your phone? According to a research done by Microsoft, our attention span in 2000 used to be 12 seconds. But in 2020, that has gone down to eight seconds. That means more than eight seconds, if I want to grab your attention and keep you fixated on what I'm saying, I have to be really, really creative. What about if I was to bring the best person, the most inspirational person in the world? Let's say Elon Musk and I put him in an auditorium and you are sitting there. How long do you think he should speak before you get bored? I mean, we are talking about top notch here. Research indicates that if you really want to give a professional level speech, then the ideal period is 18 minutes. That's why if you were to look at any TEDx or TED talks, you will find that it never exceeds 18 minutes. That's the maximum limit that TED allows you to speak. It's usually lesser 9 minutes, 12, 15, but 18 is considered the maximum that we can really keep an audience engaged. So these two variables, like eight seconds and 18 minutes, this is really how long you can engage based on your content before people get bored and move on to something else. And this applies to YouTube. Also, if you don't have something that can grab your attention, the moment you start watching it, you will move on to something else because there are billions of YouTube videos for you to watch. I started a YouTube channel three years ago. I simply knew what a YouTube channel should be. And I created for my club, Quit Challenges, a YouTube channel. But what I did and what you should do if you really want to leverage YouTube as a channel for your club is, if I can show you some of the examples of the videos that I have, I would go to the meetings and I would place my camera in front of the podium and record the whole meeting, but never upload that entire meeting to the channel. I would go through that whole video and find segments that I thought were interesting. Usually those segments would be the speeches, the prepared speeches, because members have really spent time to prepare, craft five to seven minutes. And I felt that that would be the ideal time for a YouTube video. Five minutes, six minutes. Beyond that, I don't think audience will actually watch that video. But then also I started extracting certain things. Like, for example, a Grammarian role. I would just take out that Grammarian role and post that two minutes or three minutes. And those are the videos that really have the views. So that is the way if you want to start building your YouTube channel. And now it's very easy, you know, now you don't have to record. You don't have to take a camera. You don't have to worry about audio. When your meeting starts, hit the record button in Zoom. And then go through that meeting, find segments that are interesting. For example, from this meeting, I found this table topics interesting. It's only two minutes. And then upload that or maybe a speech, upload that. So that way people can find what your club is doing without having to go through a two hour video. And what has that resulted in? If you look at the analytics, we are talking about almost 26, 27,000 views in 28 days, 1,700 hours of watch time. So it's not just that we have uploaded stuff and you have only a few but people are actually watching that content. And we are not talking about long videos, right? We are talking about short videos. So people are actually watching it. Subscribers have grown by 100 in the last one month. So that is the power of YouTube. What it does is, first of all, it gives you the ability to engage people who are not Toastmasters to understand what a Toastmaster Club does and perhaps find your club. And more importantly, as I said, it shows you the growth of your members. So if you start posting their speeches, of course, with their consent, they themselves will see the growth that they have done from the time they gave Icebreaker to the time that they have given their 10th speech or 11th speech. So if you want to do something like this, I have a few recommendations for you. First of all, when you create this YouTube channel, make sure you use a dedicated club ID. Don't create a YouTube channel from a member because when that member lives, your YouTube channel goes along with him. Create a team so that two or three people are part of this team because YouTube creation is not so easy. You know, it requires skills in editing and skills in technology. So create a team that will help you to build your club. Make sure that everyone is aware of this ID so that when the new team comes on board, you don't lose the ID. You don't lose your YouTube channel. The first thing you have to do is once you create your YouTube channel, immediately go and verify your account. There is an option in the YouTube. It says verify your account where you have to give your phone number. And once you verify, then you're able to upload longer videos or use it for streaming. So these are the four things that you should do. Once you create the channel, what is the content that you should be posting? First of all, it can be a mixture of long and short videos. Mostly your videos should be short. But of course, once in a while, you can upload an entire workshop, maybe entire meeting for some reference purpose. But for the content that needs to be engaging, find interesting aspects in your video, edit it out, give some title to it and then upload it to the channel. And that brings me to the title itself. Whenever you upload something, come up with a creative title. Just don't say meeting number two and 103 or meeting number four, whatever or speech number so and so. Come up with a title that is attractive and a thumbnail that reflects what is inside that video. Because these are the two elements that people see when they search videos and that makes them click to find what is this interesting thing we are talking about. Title and thumbnail are the most critical aspects of your YouTube video. Tags are very important. When you create a video, give as many tags that reflect what is inside it. Public speaking, confidence, leadership, you know, supportive. These are the tags. Once you put them, anybody who's searching for public speaking tips, boom, your video will be there for them to view. And this is very important. It's very difficult for us to stay consistent. We create a YouTube channel, we put few videos, then we forget about it. We don't have that enthusiasm. So have a plan with your team once a week or two videos a week and stick to that plan. Just keep uploading. It's a numbers game when it comes to YouTube. The more videos you upload, the better your engagement. And finally, the new thing that has come up and which reflects what I was talking about, attention span. YouTube has now come up with a new option called YouTube Shorts, which is equivalent to TikTok. And those are usually done with your mobile phone. The ideal length for a YouTube short is 15 seconds. Maximum is two minutes. There is a separate platform for watching YouTube Shorts and people just have become so obsessed with YouTube Shorts. This is something you can use to, let's say, promote your club or give some messages about your upcoming meetings. Use YouTube Shorts. My time is over. Back to you, master of ceremony.