News & Blog 6 Ways to Optimize for Find My Audience on YouTube
YouTube has hit 1 billion active users each month – that’s almost ⅓ of all the people on the internet and they watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views!
When it comes to growing your channel, knowing how to build a YouTube audience is equally as important as creating great content. Your viewership is one of the most powerful assets in your business. Without viewers, you will not succeed on YouTube.
A large part of creating high quality content involves passion and dedication, but when you look a little deeper, there’s a science to engaging audiences too.
Here are the tips to find the right audiences on YouTube and keep them coming back.
1. Match your expertise to the type of content you want to produce. Be consistent too.
Before you start thinking about the audience you want to reach, ask yourself what you’re good at. Are you a total movie buff? Experienced make-up guru? Comedian at heart? Choosing to focus your channel on an area that you’re well-versed in sets you up to succeed. When you speak to your passions, your knowledge and personality shine through. Bonus: you’ll come across as genuine and authentic (we’ll speak more on that later).
2. Do your research on the audience you wish to reach, and start speaking their language.
Once you’ve figured out the type of content you want to produce, it’s time to consider your audience. When it comes to targeting the right one and getting them to engage with your content, you need to do your research. Find out the names of relevant fan communities, learn their lingo, and incorporate their official names and vocabulary into your speak. From Tumblr to Reddit, communities congregate in specific places and you want to help shape those discussions.
3. Be genuine and socialize.
YouTube may be the hub for television, movies, music, and entertainment in general, but it’s still a social media platform at the core. Like any other social media platform, you want to get involved in conversations and, well, socialize. Like and comment on videos that catch your attention, give shout-outs to other influencers and content creators, ask interesting questions, and engage with your subscribers. The YouTube community values authenticity above all, and being genuine in your videos is what keeps viewers involved. Don’t treat your channel simply as a means to self-promote. If you’re going to engage in some self-promotion though, be transparent and have fun with it!
4. Monitor your success.
Get comfortable looking into your channel’s analytics to find out what works. This is important as it can help you replicate success. Tools are helpful, but what’s better is staying on top of all the information in general and setting aside time to do so. vidIQ’s web app is the go-to place to do this as you can monitor your videos, your competitor’s channels, and find key insights to help when producing future content. Setting aside time to capitalize on research will pay off in the long run.
5. Optimize your videos for search (for YouTube and the web in general).
Optimizing your videos for search will help build traffic, much like how SEO is a critical component of ensuring written content succeeds across the web. Craft your video headlines and descriptions carefully, incorporating any trending topics and keywords that are relevant to it. Avoid the urge to overuse video tags though, and only use those that actually apply to your video. vidIQ Pro’s proprietary Keyword Research Tool makes it super easy to discover powerful tags to help improve your videos’ search ranking.
6. Share your videos on other social media platforms and content discovery engines.
Other social channels are great places to share YouTube videos. They provide an opportunity to tag/mention friends, brands, and other content creators too. Not only will this attract more viewers, it’s also a great way to generate and keep a conversation going outside of YouTube. Pick the channel where your desired audience is the most active. Then, make sure the content you’re adding contributes to the conversation. Seeding your content into discovery engines like Stumble Upon can also be a good way to drive additional traffic to your videos.
