Sharing a YouTube video is easy. All you need to do is send a link to the person you want to share it with. But what if you’re making something more public, and can’t share a direct link to everyone? How do you add a YouTube video to a website, or a PowerPoint presentation? That’s where embedding comes in.
Embedding a video basically means inserting the YouTube video into another piece of content like a web page. It’s different than just posting a URL for users to click on in that the YouTube video player itself will appear on the website. It’s a great way to increase engagement on websites and other platforms by making sure the user doesn’t have to navigate away from the website to watch a video.
For example, if you make a brand video for your business, you can upload the video to YouTube and embed that in your website so the web page isn’t slowed down by having to host a huge file, and the video fits neatly around supporting copy. Users can read about your business and watch the video without ever having to leave the website.
There are several ways you can embed a YouTube video and the way you do it depends on where you want it to end up.
If you’re embedding a YouTube video on a website, first go to the video on YouTube and click Share underneath the video player. This will present you with a few options, one of which will be an embed code, or an iframe. On the web page you are editing, find the section that lets you embed videos — this could be a specific ‘add video’ feature like you might find in WordPress, or it could be a block of HTML. Add the code in the relevant place and the YouTube video will appear on the web page.
Embedding YouTube videos in documents like PowerPoint presentations is a little different. Navigate to Insert and then select Video, and enter the URL of the video you want to embed. This will embed the video as an element that you can move around and change the size of. Each platform will have a slightly different way of doing this but whether you’re using Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides the process is pretty much the same. The benefit of embedding a video here is that you don’t need to download a video and add it to the document since users will be able to stream it directly from YouTube without leaving the document.
Rather than sharing other people’s videos on your website, why not create your own content? Try using video editing software like Pinnacle Studio to edit videos by trimming footage, adding graphics, music and color filters, and generally customizing your content completely. Once you have edited your video, upload it to YouTube to create your own embed link and share the content wherever you like.
Embedding YouTube videos is a useful way of letting people watch them without having to send them to the YouTube website. Videos can become part of the user experience whether they are browsing a website or viewing a PowerPoint presentation. To embed a YouTube video, simply navigate to the Share icon and find the embed link or the iframe and add it to the HTML block in the website. Remember that you can only embed videos on a website you have access to edit, but you can add videos directly into any document you create.