We’ve talked before about using sites like Facebook and Twitter to promote blogs and businesses.  For anyone who’s using YouTube - or is thinking about heading in that direction - there’s a special new monitoring tool called Hot Spots.

Hot Spots aims to show content creators how well their videos are doing in comparison to the competition.  As is somewhat typical of Google’s tools, Hot Spots doesn’t share specific numbers, but you should be able to get a decent idea of what’s working and what’s not at most points in time.

An entry on the YouTube Blog explains, “The Hot Spots tab in Insight plays your video alongside a graph that shows the ups-and-downs of viewership at different moments within the video.  We determine ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ spots by comparing your video’s abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards.”

And then the entry explains some more, continuing, “So what does that mean?  Well, when the graph goes up, your video is hot: few viewers are leaving, and people may be rewinding on the control bar to see that sequence again.  When the graph goes down, your content’s gone cold: viewers are moving to another part of the video or leaving the video entirely.”

Using this information, marketers should be able to figure out what parts of their message are most interesting to their audience.  From there, they can either retool their video-making strategy or perhaps just release some “best of” compilations.

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