It’s crazy to think that every day the social media stats continue to evolve. Recently the YouTube stats are pretty shocking — it is now more popular with teens than Facebook is! Social media is leaning toward video-sharing platforms, which is why Facebook and Instagram are trying hard to hop the bandwagon. As a new only company ignoring YouTube is a big mistake. It’s time to rethink that strategy. Join us during our free webinar training to learn how to improve an online business and build an audience through social media sites such as YouTube.
Leverage comments
Agora Pulse recommends leveraging comments and using them to your advantage. Communicate with your viewers and use comments as an opportunity to find out what they liked and didn’t care to see. Comments can give you a lot of guidance if you let them!
The holy grail of engagement on all social media channels is a comment. Once people start commenting on your posts, tweets, and videos, it shows they are interested in what you’re talking about.
So, once you start getting comments on your YouTube videos you need to take it up a notch. The great thing is, you can add your YouTube profiles to your Agorapulse dashboard and monitor them from there– in the same place as your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, G+ and LinkedIn!
From there you can view/accept/reject/hide fan comments and respond to or assign them to other team members.Pro Tip
The comment section is a great place to pan for content marketing ideas. If your viewers are asking questions about your product or service, turn the questions into a blog post or a Q&A video. And be sure to thank and tag those who asked a question!
Social network links
Are you including social network links on your videos? Sam Nuku reminds businesses not to leave out their social media links because it can take them to your social profiles where they can learn more about your site. And if they head to your site, hopefully, they’ll become a subscriber or customer! That’s the ultimate goal, right?!
Another thing you can do, which doesn’t improve your rank, but it helps with building authority and authenticity with Brand YOU Inc is to include social network links.
If you want to keep people away from your professional LinkedIn profile or personal Facebook profile then I recommend building business ones like Facebook Fan Pages that you can send people to.
You can use just about anything you want from Pinterest to Instagram to Soundcloud if you wish.
Here’s the key: put the links in that you WANT people to find you on!
Don’t go creating 10 social accounts and giving all links. No. Create 1 or 2 channels you’re going to be on consistently providing value and refer people to those links. Got it?
Create playlists
Agora Pulse also recommends setting up playlists that target your audience. More people are likely to visit your channel if they find you via a playlist they like too. Use playlists to your advantage to grow your brand.
Here’s where most brands go wrong with their YouTube community building strategy. They have a ton of videos, so they throw them all on their channel. Perhaps they make a few playlists like “company videos” or “products” but that’s it.
You need to create relevant playlists that fit with your target audience. Check out the Apartment Therapy channel. Each playlist hits a different sweet spot and makes it easy for me as a viewer to find what I’m looking for. With playlist titles like “How To’s and Hacks” and “Organizing 101” viewers can instantly dive into the topic they want.Pro Tip
Notice the relevant thumbnails on each playlist and video? That’s super important. Thumbnails are often the bait that pulls in viewers so yours should be high quality, relevant and intriguing. Make your thumbnails in Canva sized to ‘1280×720.’
Call to Action
You already should know that a call to action in a blog post is essential, and similarly, Sam Nuku reminds us why it’s important to mention on YouTube videos as well. Building a business requires thinking outside the box and telling viewers that they need to subscribe is one of the first steps you can take to coming up with creative ways to get people to stick around.
So taking End Cards another step further because a call to action is a MUST-DO if you want any sorta success in building a business.
Giving an actual command as to what to do next will help your audience more then you realise.
Give people 1 specific action, maybe 2. Absolutely no more then 3! The less however is better.
I highly recommend you have a landing page you can send people to. Make the opt-in as specific and as relateable to the topic you’re talking about in the video as it’ll have a much higher conversion rate.
Remember in doing so you will have people subscribe to your email list which allows you to market to them and build your relationship with them again and again!
If you’re going to ask for a second option I’d suggest asking people to subscribe to your channel. If they liked this video you want to take advantage of being able to have them as subscribers where they’ll likely get more and more content from you so that you can build more authority and they get more valuable content from you.
Promote your channel everywhere
There are always more ways to promote your channel, and thus your online business, which is why Agora Pulse recommends sharing it everywhere. Hey, you can even share it with Grandma and show her how to share it on her Facebook page! Every little bit of sharing helps.
We touched on this previously but let’s delve into it because YouTube community building is all about increasing subscribers and engaging them.
If you’re just uploading a video to your channel and moving on to your next task, then you’re missing out. When you upload a video, you will want to share it across to your Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin channels. Remember to make the caption different and relevant for each space. Then, using your Agorapulse calendar, schedule in some updates for the future which link back to your YouTube video.
Pro Tip
Repetition is #coolnotcool so be sure to repeat your social sharing but with a different caption, thumbnail and call to action. You will also want to repeat at different times of the day to engage followers who may be in a different time zone.
Improve your video’s SEO
Don’t forget about SEO, which Hootsuite says can help make a difference. Check out their YouTube hack on how to improve the SEO.
Content creators and marketers know that visibility is key. And one of the best ways to improve visibility is through search engine optimization (SEO), which will get your content to appear higher up in online search results.
An easy way to optimize a YouTube video for search engines is by adding a transcript to your video’s description field.
How to do it:
To do this, go to your video on YouTube and click on the Subtitles/CC icon beneath the play button (“CC” means closed caption). You’ll then be prompted to set your language—set yours to your video’s language. Next, you’ll be given four ways to add subtitles or closed captions to your video by:
Uploading your transcript as a file. Google (YouTube’s parent company) gives a good breakdown of what types of files you can upload.
Typing or pasting in your video’s transcript where subtitle timings will be automatically set.
Typing in your subtitles or closed captions while you watch the video.
Paying a professional service to transcribe (or translate) your video for you.
It’s still YouTube
Ultimately YouTube is still YouTube, and that’s what makes it so incredible. Fast Company eludes that it’s a site all on its own and hopefully, nothing will or can compare to it. I guess only time will tell.
The internal dialog at YouTube that led to Community began around a year and a half ago, and the new features have been in active development for a little less than a year. It’s tempting to view their introduction as an epoch-shifting move—the first step in a metamorphosis from video portal into a general-purpose social network more directly competitive with Facebook and Twitter. YouTube, after all, has been synonymous with one type of content for the entire dozen years of its existence, in a way that’s atypical for a service of its epic scale. (Even the famously minimalist Instagram started with still images, added video, beefed up its messaging capabilities, and has lately cloned features straight from Snapchat.)
But if you interpret Community as a radical departure, you’re getting way, way ahead of what YouTube has actually built. It lives inside one tabbed section of a YouTube that otherwise looks . . . well, exactly like YouTube. (Channel subscribers can also see Community posts in their subscription feeds and get smartphone notifications about them.) The new types of content that creators can publish are designed to supplement video rather than rival it; if they were a stand-alone service, it would be too basic to attract anyone’s attention.
Now that you’ve learned some smart YouTube hacks to implement, join us during our free webinar training! You deserve to have a successful online business, and we want to help you get there.
Sources: Agora Pulse, Fast Company, Sam Nuku, Hootsuite
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