Creator's Guide to Titles, Tags, and Descriptions

As a creator, it’s not only important to have great content and thumbnails - you also need to think about the title, tags, and descriptions you use when you share your clips with the world. All these different elements contribute to how the community discovers and interacts with your content. While titles, tags, and descriptions may have slightly different impacts on different platforms (ex. TikTok vs. Instagram vs. FreshCut), we’ll cover the fundamentals that will help you no matter where you’re sharing your short form content.

Writing the Best Titles for Your Gaming Clips

The title (along with the thumbnail) is one of the first things a viewer sees when interacting with your content. This can be when searching for content on a platform, browsing through playlists, Discover or For You feeds, or simply using the application. On some platforms - titles and descriptions can be the same thing.

There are three main things to think about when writing a good title.

1. Search engine optimization. This refers to writing titles that will show up when people search certain topics on the platform. Have a sick Valorant ace you want to share with the world? You can share that in the title so it’ll be picked up by the platform’s search engine when people search “valorant ace”. This also impacts how your clip is discovered if people search for it on Google or other search engines. Tags also contribute to search rankings on many platforms, so you can use those as well to specify the game and save you characters in your title for other descriptions. On FreshCut, we’re focused on creating a better experience for gaming creators and fans - so we have a game-specific field you can choose from when uploading your clip. This gives you more flexibility and characters to use when writing your title.

2. Clickability. You don’t only want a descriptive title, you want one that gets people clicking. While we don’t recommend clickbait (as the viewer may be disappointed to find that the content is not actually what they expected), we do recommend some creativity here. It’s good to give people a hint of what they’ll watch before they view your clip.

3. Context.The title is also space that can be used for comedy, humor or memes, it doesn’t just have to be cut and dry describing what you’re going to see in the clip. You know your audience and platform best, so experiment with titles and see what resonates!

Using Tags to Help People Discover Your Gaming Highlights

Tags can have varying impact on different platforms, but generally this is how content is indexed and discovered. For example, viewers checking out #warzone or #league will be looking for content related to the respective games. Tags can also be a variable that is incorporated by a platform’s algorithm when it personalizes contents for the “For You Page” or “Discover” feed. Checking tags before you post is a good way to see what is popular and trending for your game category or genre of content. As mentioned earlier, you can use tags for more specific descriptions of your content like game or category of content (#fails, #headshot, #clutch)  to save room in your title or description.

On FreshCut, tags can be accessed via the search bar, via trending tags on freshcut.gg, and are also used if you want to enter in our Challenges we run. Challenges are weekly clip contests hosted by the FreshCut team and creators. Share your best content using the specific tag and have a chance to win great rewards ranging from cash to game credits and Diamonds!  Learn more about Challenges here.

You can set tags in FreshCut Creator Studio.

On Instagram there is an entire section dedicated to tags.

On TikTok, you can also search by tags and they are commonly used in descriptions. Hear what two creators with over 1M followers each on TikTok have to say about tags on TikTok  in this blog. YouTube Shorts also allows the use of tags and involves them in creator challenges like Taylor Swift’s #TSAntiHeroChallenge.

Good use of tags can help viewers better discover your content. Additionally, if there are trends or popular memes relating to your content, you can use a tag so it appears if people search for it.

Creating Good Descriptions for Your Short Form Content

Last but not least, descriptions. This again can vary depending on the platform and if they allow room for descriptions. Some platforms cap how long your description can be while others give you more characters to use. For example, TikTok recently expanded its description length to up to 2200 characters, similar to Reels - but often descriptions are still short. This is because both platforms want more information to improve their search capabilities, so when users search different content, they can have more robust and accurate results. Alternately, FreshCut does not have a long description section, while YouTube longform videos are known for having extremely long descriptions with tags for different parts of video, links, and other information.

Similar to your title, having a good description comes down to context and giving the platform’s search engine (and Google as well), good content to work with. It’s important to find the balance between writing interesting descriptions that get people to read and click with descriptions that have lots of detailed information about your content.

We hope these tips on titles, tags, and descriptions were helpful. Try out different things with your content and see what works best. There’s no one size fits all advice. Also keep in mind that platforms are constantly tuning and adjusting their algorithms - so what works well today may not be true in a few months. The most successful creators have told us they are always experimenting with their titles, tags, and descriptions in order to see what is having the most impact with their community and with the platform.

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