YouTube is NOT a Social Media Platform!

The title of this blog is really just to spark interest, I’m not here to quibble over the definition of social media. My point is about how to use the YouTube platform effectively and that involves a mind shift of what kind of marketing you should be doing with YouTube. It’s not the same as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 

The Recency Machine

Let’s start with a question: Do you think people are looking at your old Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn posts? The truth is that social posts are generally seen for a few days and then the river flows on and there are new posts to look at. That’s because most social media algorithms focus on ‘Recency’.

The algorithms have an enormous bias towards content that is new and fresh. Unfortunately, that means your content gets stale quickly and soon it falls out of the algorithm altogether and pretty much isn’t seen ever again. This makes us feel like we’re in a hamster wheel constantly needing to keep posting new material. This in turn creates a situation where each piece of content needs to have a lower budget so that more content can be created so that you can keep feeding the recency machine. But as the quality of the content goes down the engagement goes down and the content reaches fewer people, so you create more content at a faster pace, stretching the budget even further, until you collapse in a heap from exhaustion or perhaps get fired by your CMO.

Most people think of YouTube as a social media platform and overlook that YouTube is actually a Video Search Engine. In fact, it’s the 2nd largest search engine in the world, only behind Google itself. And YouTube plays a key role in Google Search by providing video results even above web page results when appropriate.

Relevance

Exactly like a search engine, YouTube focuses on Relevance. Yes it has some of the similarities to a social network in that you can subscribe to people’s feeds, you can browse through the feed for recent posts, and you can leave comments on videos. But a very common way people use YouTube is through the search engine feature.

When we need to learn about growing tomatoes, we type “how to grow tomatoes” into the search bar, and then browse the results looking for a compelling video title and thumbnail that promises answers to our question in a video format. You do this. Almost everyone does this because YouTube is great at providing ‘relevant’ results, not just recent results.

In fact, I will argue that different marketing platforms serve different audience types. Obviously, this is a simplified reduction of an idea, but essentially you have social media platforms that are designed for your existing audience. These are people that already know you and want to hear more from you.

Then you have the platforms that are designed for discovery and can help you get new audience members. These platforms serve to market your brand to people that might not have ever heard of you. So, to me, it makes natural sense that you would treat these marketing channels very differently and probably have different content on each.

You can see that YouTube is on both sides of this equation because of the simple idea that it has the power to speak to both audience types. It can help you grow your audience by introducing new people to your brand and it can also satisfy those that want to hear more from you when they become a subscriber. This same idea actually applies to your blog and Pinterest as well. 

YouTube is a Search Engine

As a search engine, YouTube can deliver views on your videos months or even years from now. So we’ve established that YouTube is a search engine and now I want to point out that you should treat your content strategy for YouTube differently than you treat your social media strategy.

One effective strategy we can use is called YouTube SEO and it really helps your videos get discovered by the algorithm of the search engine over time by properly optimizing every aspect of your video’s metadata for the long tail effect.  It’s really not very different from a blogging and standard SEO approach that you might use on your website.

How to get more views on YouTube

 

1) Keyword Research

Do some keyword research to actually figure out what potential topics are being searched for but are still somewhat competitive. There are many tools for this, some even help you apply this keyword research directly to your metadata. You can learn more about keyword research and how to develop a keyword strategy by downloading a free sample chapter of “YouTubility” called “Keyword Research” here.

 

2) Create content people want to watch

A lot of brands are so focused on talking about themselves that they don’t produce content anyone but them wants to watch. It has to provide value for the audience. Your content needs to fall into one of three buckets. 

  • Inspirational 
  • Entertainment
  • Educational

 

3) Custom Thumbnails

Create custom thumbnails for your videos that are highly clickable, spark curiosity, and are designed to drive clicks. These are your mini billboards in Times Square. You need these to be very very thoughtful. Don’t let YouTube pick your thumbnail. You can learn more about creating great thumbnails with our “Thumbnails That Crush” guide available here.

4) Understand your analytics

You should understand your analytics and use the data to make better videos. YouTube has an amazingly robust analytics platform so you can understand where your traffic is coming from, how long people are watching, what they are clicking on during or after your video, and so much more. Use this data to get better. We’re building a course around understanding your analytics and you can get on the notification list of when that course is ready here.

5) Keep Publishing 

Youtube is a long game. Think in terms of years not weeks. Create evergreen videos that are still useful to people in 5+ years. Keep getting better, keep pushing the topics into unique new spaces, and keep connecting with new people via your videos. You will eventually have a lovely garden of content that continues to grow even while you’re doing other things.

One of my favorite YouTubers only posts 12 videos a year but he’s got over 1.2 billion views of his videos. So getting your YouTube game right can obviously pay off.

Sounds easy right? The problem is that all this stuff takes a lot of time to do. Putting up a post on Facebook or Instagram really doesn’t take that long but doing all the work to create success on YouTube can take quite a while. That’s why we offer to take a lot of this off your plate.

We know the pain points of growing YouTube channels and have built solutions so that we can help your brand or organization grow on YouTube.

If you want to finally start making serious progress with your YouTube channel… we can help. It’s easy to schedule a strategy call using the button below.

 

 

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