Are you using YouTube to promote your business, your website/blog, or simply to raise your personal profile? YouTube is a great promotional platform with a huge user base of over 1 billion subscribers. And they watch billions of YouTube videos every day about every possible subject you can think of.
Just take a look at these statistics:
- YouTube is the second most popular site in the world after Google.
- Every single day, YouTubers spend over a billion hours watching video content on the social media platform.
- More than 90% of people say they have discovered new brands and products either on the YouTube website or the YouTube App.
- 80% of shoppers said they watched a YouTube video related to a planned purchase at the start of the shopping process.
- YouTubers are 3x more likely to prefer watching a tutorial video on YouTube to reading a product’s instructions when it comes to understanding how new products work.
As you can see from the statistics above, YouTube opens up a goldmine of opportunities for marketers and entrepreneurs looking to grow their businesses. Even YouTube Kids is showing signs of immense potential for that niche market.
However, building and growing a YouTube channel is a task that’s challenging and time-consuming. If your knowledge on tips and tricks for YouTube isn’t up to date, you can waste a lot of time and energy without achieving significant results.
YouTube Tip #1: Socialize and Engage
At the end of the day, YouTube is a social media network. With a focus on the “social” that means in order to grow your YouTube channel, you need to engage your fans and subscribers. And respond to the comments you get in a timely manner.
This doesn’t exactly fall into the category of tips and tricks, but it is an important point to keep in mind, nonetheless.
A lot of marketers invest all of their time and energy into just creating videos. But you need to understand that YouTube content creation is only half the job. If you want to grow your YouTube channel, you need to invest time into getting engagement.
You can use your YouTube videos and your video descriptions to ask your audience questions. And to give them reasons to want to engage with you.
Make your subscribers feel that their observations, comments, and suggestions are welcome. A common YouTube trick to get more engagement is to give your subscribers the kind of content they’d like to see on your YouTube channel.
And when they do respond, you can use a social media management tool like Agorapulse to help you manage all of your comments more easily and quickly.
Ideally, like with other social media networks, you should strive to respond to comments as soon as possible, as this is the best way to get a conversation going.
Plus, if you get any negative comments, you don’t want them left unanswered for too long, for others to see. Here is a YouTube tip to tackle this situation: apologize and ask them the reason for their negative comments. This way, you show that you care.
With Agorapulse, you can also pre-moderate your comments and see all of them in one place. So, if you find anything that promotes hate speech or is inappropriate, you can reject it right away.
YouTube Tip #2: Leverage your YouTube Channel Community Tab to Boost Engagement
Another YouTube tip to boost your engagement – which has a direct effect on your channels’ success – is to leverage the Community tab.
You can find it on your YouTube channel page:
Here, you can post content just like you would on Facebook or Twitter, for example, in order to engage your audience (both subscribers and non-subscribers).
Use the opportunity to post all kinds of engaging content. Like a behind-the-scenes image from your latest filming experience. Or maybe a GIF promoting your upcoming YouTube video.
Or, like Evan Carmichael does in the screenshot above, poll your audience to increase their involvement and engagement.
Make sure to also tell your audience about your Community tab. You can post a YouTube video about it where you talk about your new community tab and tell people to check it out.
Don’t forget to mention it in the YouTube video description, too. And you can also promote it on your other digital channels.
This YouTube tip can be extremely helpful for attracting new subscribers to your YouTube channel. That’s because the Community Tab can be seen by both your subscribers and viewers who have not subscribed.
For subscribers, the Community posts will appear in their subscription feeds or in the Home feed.
For those who haven’t subscribed, there is a “Subscribe Button” which enables users to subscribe to posts directly from the Community growth. In a nutshell, if you nail this YouTube tip, you’ll actually be able to drive subcribers growth.
Since, non-subscribers can also see the Community tab, it’s a good idea to introduce it with a short video or post. It’s a simple YouTube trick to let viewers know who you are and what you do.
YouTube Tip #3: Create Custom Thumbnails for All of Your Videos
Have you heard the saying, “the devil is in the details”? Well, that’s very relevant when it comes to our next YouTube tip.
Your video’s thumbnail is your chance to leave users with a solid first impression. Let’s face it: users judge your YouTube videos by the thumbnails you use.
Good video thumbnails can either leave them wanting to watch YouTube videos or your channel or cause them to scroll away. Obviously, you don’t want the latter to happen.
So, here is a tried-and-tested YouTube tip for you: create custom thumbnails for all of your videos.
Custom thumbnails take minutes (even seconds once you have a template set up!) to create. And they can make a world of difference to your success on YouTube.
That’s because the random thumbnail you get is boring, sometimes unflattering, and rarely eye-catching. But a colorful and well-designed thumbnail will attract people’s attention and will help your videos stand out in a list:
Plus, as I mentioned before, they’re very easy to create. You just need a free tool like Canva or Crello; choose YouTube Thumbnails from the list of formats to get started.
YouTube Tip #4: Create a Posting Schedule – And Stick to It!
It’s very difficult to grow a YouTube channel if you’re not posting new content consistently – and frequently. So, one of the best tips and tricks for YouTube is to create and post content regularly.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. But I’ve got a YouTube tip for you that will help you stay disciplined in your approach: plan in advance.
Create a YouTube content schedule so that you can space out your uploads. While creating your content schedule, consider the time you will require to create and edit your content.
This YouTube tip will help you plan out your content calendar and keep track of what you’re uploading, and when. This way, you can space out your videos and maintain consistency.
Not only do you get to reach more people the more videos you have, but your subscribers will know exactly when to expect a new video from you.
Take the time to put together a schedule ahead of time:
- Set the days of the week (preferably, multiple days of the week) and the exact time to upload your videos on each day
- Plan a diverse content strategy with multiple types of videos: how to videos, animated videos, listicle videos, and so on.
YouTube Tip #5: Optimize Your Videos for the YouTube Search Engine
Google might be the king when it comes to search engines and things like Google Trends, but YouTube is up there with the best of them.
As mentioned earlier, it’s the second most popular website in the world, with hundreds of millions of people using it on a daily basis. And they are actively searching for videos so you need to make sure that they can find yours too.
To get more visibility on things like Google Trends, you optimize your blog posts and site for SEO. Similarly, you need to optimize your videos for YouTube analytics. If you want to grow your YouTube channel, this is one of the most important YouTube tips.
There are several important elements that factor into YouTube video optimization.
Some of the most important ones, though, are the keywords and tags you use. Just like you would with blog posts, use relevant keywords in your headlines and video descriptions and add relevant tags to every video you post.
To help, you can use a tool like Tube Buddy, which is a YouTube-certified browser extension with several useful features, including video SEO features. It can help you:
- Find out what keywords and tags your competitors are using successfully in their videos (or any YouTube video).
- Get tag suggestions as you type your video description and headline.
- Track your videos’ rankings.
- Find the most used tags for any topic/niche.
Before you begin working on your SEO, here is a YouTube tip for you: understand how the platform works and which metrics are crucial for you.
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