Introducing EmbedPlus: YouTube for WordPress

The following is a guest post by Tay Omojokun.

Increase Viewer Engagement of Your YouTube Embeds with EmbedPlus

YouTube, being the most visited video site, is also the most embedded video host. It comes with no surprise that several plugins have been built to help with embedding in WordPress. One of these is offered by EmbedPlus, a service that creates YouTube enhancement tools with extra features that are unavailable in the standard player. Take a look at the screenshot below to see an EmbedPlus enhanced video. You’ll see an extra control bar at the bottom containing some of these features.

Features

Here’s a list of some of the important ones:

• Video Reactions (from Google+, Reddit, and more)
• Chapter Marking (custom and social)
• Timed–Annotations (with link support for calls–to–action)
• DVD–like controls (Instant Replay, Slow Motion, Looping …)

To see these features in action, simply play around with the demo on the EmbedPlus homepage. You might find that from both a viewer and blogger perspective, the ‘React’ feature is probably the most attractive feature as it shows Internet–wide reactions right from your blog. The premise is that discussions about a video occur across the web – from YouTube.com to communities like Reddit. So, why not show this extra content right on your blog?

Below is a screenshot of the reactions displayed from the recent and highly popular Marvel Avengers movie. As displayed, users are able to view a list of communities and expand one to see what people are saying. It’s like having a comment thread displayed to viewers of your blog.

Setup/Usage

After you download the plugin, most of the features are automatically included in your embeds by just pasting a YouTube link as shown below. Hence, the plugin follows the oEmbed method.

To customize an embed with properties like your own chapters and annotations, the plugin provides a wizard that works right within WordPress. Just click on the EmbedPlus button that is added to the rich text editor after installation and the wizard launches with a request for a YouTube video URL. After a few steps of inputting your customizations, you’ll get short code to embed that will encapsulate them. The launch button and an example short code are pictured below. You’ll also find that you can launch the wizard by visiting the Settings>EmbedPlus page on WordPress and scrolling down the page.

In short, if you ever embed YouTube videos, EmbedPlus’ plugin is an easy–to–use yet feature rich plugin. The EmbedPlus team is always looking for more features and ways to simplify the plugin to users. If you want to try the enhanced player out first before adding to your blog, you might want to try the Chrome extension that adds the extra features to the YouTube videos you watch while browsing the web, even on YouTube.com. Along these lines, the service is experimenting with the idea of how its features can enhance videos embedded in reference sites. Their pronunciation dictionary also provides numerous YouTube videos that are automatically enhanced.