Add YouTube Videos into BatchBook
- Posted October 29th, 2010
- Filed under: How We Do It, Using BatchBook
With their growing importance and popularity, videos are becoming a big part of online communication. You can track your contact’s videos on YouTube, but did you know you can pull those videos right in to your contact pages in BatchBook?
The first thing you need to do is to create a super tag field to hold the YouTube feed. The built in Social Media super tag is perfect for this. Simply edit it and add a new Feed Reader field called YouTube. Be sure that type of feed is Blog/RSS Feed.
Next, you need to create a search in YouTube for what videos you want to pull into BatchBook. You can also get a feed from a user page, so if your contact has a user page this would be the best place to grab a feed from.
If your contact doesn’t have a page, you can search YouTube based on a topic that might be interesting to them or related to them in some way. For my example, I have a contact who loves Muppets, so I am going to create a YouTube search for Muppets.
The search returns a bunch of results, and it will be updated as new videos are uploaded.
YouTube does not provide an easy link to the RSS Feed that you will be needing, so you will need to discover the feed before pasting into the YouTube super tag field.
Most major internet browsers include an easy way to discover the feed. They include an RSS icon either in the url box or nearby.
In Explorer:
In Firefox:
If you click on this icon from a YouTube search results or user page, you will be taken to a new page, which is the RSS feed page.
As you can see, the url changes. This new url is the feed that you will be putting into the YouTube super tag field.
Now, if you are a like me and use Google Chrome, you will not see an RSS icon in the address box. This feature is not built into Chrome. The good news is that there is an extension for it, the RSS
Subscription
Extension.
This extension will help you find the RSS feed, but there is one extra step. After clicking on it from the YouTube page, it will open a new page but not provide an RSS address. You will need to click on the text link for feed (it is to the right in the blue bar near the top) to open another page with the RSS feed url. Then you can copy the url.
After you find the RSS feed url, getting YouTube results into BatchBook is easy. On your contact in BatchBook, make sure the Social Media super tag is applied. You should now have a YouTube field. Paste the feed url into this field and click save. You should now be seeing the three most recent YouTube videos.
Getting YouTube results in BatchBook is a great way to keep up with your contacts new videos or to find interesting videos to share with your contacts. And while you’re checking out YouTube, have a look at our new BatchBlue YouTube page. We’re looking forward to doing more videos ourselves in upcoming months.
