YouTube has over 5 billion video views and over 1 billion hours watched. YouTube surpasses Netflix and Facebook combined in watch time, so the prospect of 4,000 hours of watch time for your channel remains somewhat open.
Building an audience and growing YouTube views seems like a challenge, because… well, it is. YouTube growth tips can help you attract new viewers to your videos, retain viewers, and gain new YouTube subscribers.
How can you continue to grow as a YouTube channel owner? How do you overcome a growth plateau? How do you do this without spending a lot of money and buying advertising? You have to use every YouTube growth trick you can find.
First, how do we define YouTube growth hacks? These are tips and ideas that are relatively easy to implement but can lead to great results. So let’s go.
SEO helps you grow on YouTube
Is SEO a trick for YouTube growth? Based on the definition we gave above, yes… but that’s more of a best practice for YouTube. If you say, “Yes, yes. I know. I already optimized my videos for SEO. What else do you have?! Then move on to the next section: Looking beyond YouTube to grow on YouTube.
As a brand creator or individual video content creator, the challenge is the same. You want YouTube’s algorithms to recommend videos to you to reach your share of YouTube’s more than two billion active users.
If you want to grow on YouTube, you need to look beyond YouTube
Optimizing your content for search is important, but it’s not a silver bullet. You need an initial spike in interest that tells the YouTube algorithm that your video is worth paying attention to.
Once you’ve built an audience on other channels, you can use this to promote your videos. This will give your YouTube video the initial boost it needs to rank higher on YouTube and Google Search.
So how can you use your marketing channels to bring video content to a wider audience?
Make use of social media channels.
Sharing videos on social media is always a good idea to generate initial interest. The fact is that social media platforms want to keep users on their platforms. They don’t want to send traffic to YouTube if they can help it. We must therefore play the social platform game by creating new resources for sharing.
By tailoring your videos to each of these social platforms, you can develop a multi-channel marketing approach to video distribution. This is beneficial for many reasons, but let’s focus on our main goal: growing on YouTube.
Click on X/Twitter
Tweets, Ex, or whatever they are called now, have a short lifespan (18 minutes). To get the most out of your Twitter audience, follow expert Ann Smarty’s advice and post at least three different tweets on different days of the week and at different times.
With Twitter, you don’t just upload your video to the platform. Instead, customize the video you want to promote as follows:
Download a short video clip. The ultimate goal of promoting your video on Twitter is to encourage people to watch the full video on YouTube, where you can potentially convert that audience into channel subscribers. Then create a video trailer showcasing your most compelling and emotional moments and add a description, followed by an engaging call to action such as “Watch the full video.”
Face-to-face with Facebook
You can apply similar logic when sharing videos on Facebook. Meta in general and Facebook in particular are probably the most reluctant when it comes to driving people away from their platform. Simply posting a link to a video won’t get you anywhere. If you want to keep them off Facebook and grow on YouTube, you need to engage people on Facebook.
Create micro assets like short videos and then add a call to action to encourage people to visit your YouTube channel. Avoid adding links in the video itself, but instead, add a call to action or a link to the video in the first comment at the bottom of your post.
Instant views on Instagram
Creators can use both the In-Feed and Stories feature to capture the attention of their audience on Instagram.
Instagram has lifted some restrictions on video length, but creators should continue to keep their content short and sweet; People don’t come to Instagram looking for long-form content. Try to create short, engaging video clips that pique the viewer’s curiosity and encourage them to search for details on your YouTube channel (“link in bio”).
In general, you can follow the above guidelines for Twitter and Facebook, but there are several specific things you should take into account with Instagram:
Add a call to action. Everyone’s doing it, so you should too: When promoting your video on Instagram, add a simple call to action like “Watch full video – link in bio” or “Visit our YouTube channel for more great content’.
Add hashtag. Hashtags are very popular on Instagram. Be creative and use hashtags wisely to attract new potential audiences and drive them even further to your YouTube channel.
Post a message on your blog.
If you have a blog, you likely have a selection of top-performing articles that attract the most organic (or paid, if you promote posts on social media and search engines) traffic.
l How does this help your YouTube channel grow?
l Use Google Analytics to identify the most visited pages on your blog
l Embed relevant short video clips in your high-ranking blog posts
l And again, ask your readers to visit your YouTube channel to watch the full video and work your YouTube magic there.
However, you should take care not to overload your website with extensive video content. Yes, videos can improve your blog’s performance by increasing time on site, click-through rate, and even conversions. However, if they are poorly integrated, they can also negatively impact page loading speed, which is a bad SEO sign. This guide covers all the important details about embedding videos into your website/blog.
Final thoughts
There are many ways you can utilize videos to advertise and grow your YouTube channel. The more creative and experienced you are, the more challenging the task of video distribution becomes. But with the right tools like TubeBuddy and Wave. Video, you can focus on existing SEO and YouTube video advertising strategies to achieve tangible results without allocating large advertising and marketing budgets to your efforts.