YouTube engagement is crucial to your channel’s success.
When you do it right, you build a real relationship with your audience and your community in general. They’ll know they can count on you for great content that informs and delights them, and they’ll reward you for doing it by coming back and converting.
When you get it wrong, you leave your audience frustrated and dissatisfied. You’ll also watch the ROI of any YouTube campaign tanks you should avoid at all costs.
Here are our top 5 tips for increasing your YouTube engagement count.
Ingredients
What is YouTube engagement?
How do you calculate your YouTube engagement rate?
5 tips to increase YouTube engagement
What is YouTube engagement?
YouTube engagement is when your audience takes an action on your YouTube page or one of your YouTube videos.
The most important actions are:
- Comments These can reveal that a video resonates emotionally with viewers, and this can be good or bad depending on the sensitivity of the comments.
- Likes and dislikes. Indicates whether viewers liked your video or not. It can also reveal whether some type of video or content aspect resonates with your audience.
- shares. This shows you how often and where your viewers shared the video. Sharing can take place on various social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or via messaging platforms (e-mail, WhatsApp, etc.). They are arguably the most important metrics for YouTube engagement because they show that your video is engaging enough that people want to encourage others to watch it.
- Subscribers won and lost. YouTube also allows creators to review whether a video resulted in new followers or closing existing followers (enough to unsubscribe). This metric is the clearest indicator of a video’s quality.
Creators should always follow YouTube analytics to get the most out of their YouTube channel. All the data can help determine your channel’s growth strategy.
How do you calculate your YouTube engagement rate?
As business expert Peter Drucker once said: If you can’t measure, you can’t improve.
With the right formula, you can measure your YouTube engagement rate to big impact. One of the most common ways to do this is to measure your engagement rate by reach (ERR).
This is the percentage of viewers who engage after seeing your video or other content.
First, use the following formula on multiple posts (we recommend at least 5):
ERR = total engagement per post / reach per post * 100
Next, determine the average by adding all the ERRs from the posts you want to average and dividing by the number of posts:
Average ERR = Total ERR / Total shipments
Request! You just calculated your YouTube engagement rate. ERR can give you a solid idea of how engaging your videos are across all audiences (not just your viewers).
5 tips to increase YouTube engagement
Below are our best practices for increasing YouTube engagement. Try some or all of them to see what works for your brand.
1. Nail the thumbnail
The thumbnail of your video is arguably the most important determining factor in a viewer’s decision to watch your content, especially if it’s on their phone.
Along with the title, it’s the first thing viewers see when they browse the videos.
And it’s not enough to just pick an interesting frame from your video and use it.
Unless it’s VERY interesting of course.
You should customize your thumbnails to make sure they have a clear and powerful picture that will tell potential viewers as you shoot your video.
In fact, 90% of YouTube’s top-performing videos have custom thumbnails.
Here are a few tips for creating great thumbnails:
add text
If your video doesn’t have a super eye-catching image, add some text to your thumbnail to attract your audience. Think of it like a second title in your video. How can you take advantage of this space to really grab your audience’s attention?
One YouTuber with great thumbnails is Film Theorists.
All of its thumbnails tell the viewer what they can expect from the video – but leave just enough to entice them to click the video to watch it.
Also note how consistent the thumbnails are. Each includes the same bold red font and logo. This helps with branding and allows your viewers to instantly recognize your video from the list of others.
Use the rule of thirds
The rule of thirds is a fundamental principle in photography. It expresses the idea that the human eye is naturally drawn to the four points in an image.
Source: Wikimedia
When you create an image for your thumbnail, you will want to keep the most important aspect of the image in one of these four spots.
Some examples:
Of course, this is not a hard and fast rule. There are lots of great examples of clip art that center their images. However, if you’re looking for a way to create your thumbnail, this is a solid ground rule.
use the right tools
You’ll need thousands of dollars of luxury photo editing software to create a great clipart and hundreds of hours of training to edit them…
…I would say this if creating thumbnails weren’t incredibly easy.
In fact, there are many great, free programs to help you create beautiful images for social media.
One we recommend is Visme. This is a web application for designing graphics for almost anything, from book covers to logos and infographics.
And of course, you can create awesome thumbnails there too.
They actually have preset image sizes for YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. Thus, you can easily design without worrying about the image properties.
It’s also great for beginners, so no graphic design experience is required to create great thumbnails.
2. Organize dinner parties, not soapboxes
Not quite literally, of course, unless you have the space to host a dinner party for all your YouTube subscribers.
Brands treat social media engagement like a soapbox or a dinner party.
Soap boxes are social media accounts that focus on themselves. They exist as a place where brands can promote their products and services, while ignoring any data, metrics, and customer interaction.
Dinner parties are brands that invite and engage their audiences to chat. they are active to listen based on what their audience tells them and their reactions. A good dinner party host knows his guests well.
You also need to know your audience well if you want your YouTube page to host dinner parties instead of soap boxes. That’s why you should spend a lot of time immersing yourself in your audience’s needs, wants, and pain points.
What is your audience struggling with? what are they need to see from your video to inform and please them?
To help, we’ve created a comprehensive guide to conducting audience research to help you get to know your YouTube audience more deeply.
Think about it: Do your friends interact with you more if you invite them to a dinner party? Or if you yell at them from your soapbox about everything you’ve done in the past few weeks?
3. React (strategically) to trends
Trending events on YouTube are great sources of content for your audience. Not only is it a good way to provide entertaining videos for your audience, it’s also a solid way to increase brand awareness.
And the more people know about you (through brand awareness), the more they engage with you (through brand loyalty). After all, how are they going to like and share your videos if they don’t know who you are?
A great example comes from a trend I like to call the “experts reaction.” Below is a nice example from GQ:
In these videos, subject matter experts react to movies and TV shows that portray that subject in action. While GQ has a lineup of these videos, they’re certainly not the only ones jumping on the train.
Here’s a popular example from WIRED:
Even smaller creators have caught the big success trend:
Does that mean your brand should try to mix it up and make an “experts reaction” video? No. Unless you find that: a) something your audience wants to see and b) something that really works for your brand and services.
(So don’t expect Moyens I/O to have a “Social media experts reacting to social media use in movies” video anytime soon.)
But if the trend seems to fit both criteria, by all means go for it! And have fun doing it.
4. Collaborate with other creators
It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to increase subscribers on a newsletter, a podcast, or your YouTube channel. One of the best ways to grow your audience and increase engagement with your videos is to collaborate with other creators.
After all, loyal viewers trust creators they subscribe to. That’s why they usually subscribe to them in the first place. So if you cooperate with them, it gives you instant social proof in their eyes. Even if they weren’t aware of your brand’s existence until then.
But you shouldn’t just cooperate with anyone. Instead, find creators who are somehow involved in your industry (without a direct competitor, of course).
Here’s a great example: when YouTuber Simone Giertz appeared on Adam Savage’s Tested channel.
In this case, both creators love to build interesting things. While Simone creates robots, Savage creates a variety of things, from movie props to massive Nerf guns. Combine the two and you have a perfect collaboration moment.
5. Use the right tools
As the old adage goes: Work smarter, not harder.
Tools like Moyens I/O allow you to: Publish YouTube videos and track your performance Through a comprehensive analytics dashboard that will save you a lot of time in identifying what type of content your target audience likes the most.
Another great feature for YouTube interaction is Moyens I/O’s YouTube comment moderation tool. It allows you to view all comments on your video and delete them if necessary.
It also lets you see all the comments that came to a particular video. You can then approve or delete comments before they are published; this is great for making sure you only interact with quality, non-spam comments.
The video below shows how the comment moderation tool works.
But maybe you already get a lot of engagement with your YouTube videos and you want to repay that love by participating in other people’s videos. Moyens I/O has a solution for this too. Search for other YouTube videos in streams and interact with other creators by liking, commenting and subscribing to their content; do all this without leaving the control panel.
Grow your YouTube audience faster with Moyens I/O. Schedule videos and manage comments where you manage all your other social networks. Try it for free today.
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