YouTube has popularized the video content sector and now almost everyone wants to learn how to build a YouTube following. And with no doubt, YouTube remains the giant in the space, with a combined audience watch time of over a billion hours each day watching videos on this platform.
This effectively makes YouTube the second largest search engine in the world. Also, since YouTube is owned by Google, having a presence and decent followership on the platform could easily translate to visibility for your business, brand, or creativity.
In this article, I will be explaining how to build a YouTube following.
How to Build a YouTube Following
Building decent followership on YouTube doesn’t happen by accident. It takes a concise effort, dedication, hard work, and time to develop. Asides from these, the platform remains highly competitive even more than before.
This brings us to learn exactly how to build a YouTube following. Building YouTube following entails a YouTuber relying on a variety of promotional antics to keep the audience around. It’s important to note that some of the tips here will require extra effort than others. In the end, each one can help creators get more eyes on their channel and build decent followership on the platform.
Let’s get started:
Offer Real Value
The quickest way on how to build a YouTube following is to simply offer value with your content. So if your content is real, unique, useful, and informative enough, you are bound to create decent followership for yourself. We know this since YouTube’s algorithm for ranking favors audience experience.
Awesome content is the easiest way to keep viewers engaged as well as rank higher in search results. But the truth, there is nothing easy about creating valuable content. Oftentimes, creators have to pour hours into research, shooting, editing, and promotion of such content. But getting it right brings along lots of rewards.
While creating value for each niche will be different, a few factors are common to all. To be valuable, answer these few questions:
- What problem does this content solve?
- Is it informative, unique, and entertaining?
- Will it improve the viewer experience in any way?
If you answered the positive, then you are good to go.
Figure out What Your Audience Wants
The YouTube platform is all about creating video content for audience consumption. While many newcomers will just churn out content after content, one way on how to build a YouTube following is to know your audience better. Irrespective of the content you create, you want to ensure it resonates and aligns with what your audience truly wants.
All of this has to do with building relevant social media targeting skills to help you discern audience yearnings. One simple method to perform this is to take a quick look at what your competitors in the same niche as you are creating. Thankfully, some metrics are available to the public such as views and engagement. This provides a detailed description of which topics the audience in your niche wants to watch as well as the delivery style they like.
For established YouTubers, a quick but thorough glance at your YouTube Analytics should provide the necessary information. The YouTube Analytics tool is a powerful one that can help guide creators on many fronts. There is detailed information on audience demographics, location, engagement, and a handful of other metrics. Another option is to use third-party tools to help analyze your content. Although this might be effective, you might end up spending cash on these third-party tools.
Enhance Your Persona
For one, the YouTube platform is one giant stage where content creators get to perform their art for billions of views. To grow on YouTube, creators need to upgrade or transform themselves into lovable characters. Another way is to simply enhance the persona they normally present.
Content creators with ordinary or stale day-to-day personalities have no choice but to revamp or portray themselves in a much more relaxed and open manner. Doing this could give them the necessary edge to stand out among the competition. To know how this works, put yourself in the position of a viewer: would you watch a video from a creator that appears cold, distant, and unimaginative, or simply too normal?
The truth is audience love it when content creators are enthusiastic and open about their content. This creates an invitational atmosphere and they will certainly come in for the view. Therefore, give the audience a reason to want to watch your content and not that of your competition.
Bottom-line; create an interesting persona that’s still you but much more inviting and intriguing. Some YouTubers have even gone all the way to create an entirely different character altogether. This may work for them but it certainly won’t work for everyone.
Keep up Consistency
Just like every other business, keeping up with consistency is an important attribute. In like fashion, YouTube rewards consistency, making it extremely crucial if you intend to attain a million views and more.
Consistency here doesn’t mean you should upload content on a daily basis. But rather, create and upload one or two videos per week on the same day and time. For channels with lengthy, high-production content, video content per month should be sufficient.
Irrespective of how many videos you post per week or per month, if your aim is to make a living from the platform, then you had better start taking it as your job. To simplify things, follow these guidelines:
- Plan an upload schedule
- Produce weekly or monthly videos
- Don’t veer from your upload dates
The YouTube algorithm has consistently penalized irregular uploads by not ranking their contents high enough or failing to recommend it to new viewers or appear on their trending page.
Consistency is one of the most important attributes about how to grow on YouTube and you better get some to stand any chance of succeeding on the platform.
Engage with the YouTube community
Whether you like it or not, YouTube is a social media platform and audiences often come to socialize. If you’ve ever thought otherwise, now will be a good time to change your mindset. YouTube allows its users to socialize and engage with one another through its “comment” and “like” features.
This is why if you want to learn about how to build a YouTube following, you must learn to improve your engagements. If that isn’t enough reason for you, consider that the YouTube algorithm favors content with more engagements as such, ranks them higher. That said, engaging with your subscribers can help develop a stronger relation and inline build healthy followership.
Thankfully, engaging with your audience on YouTube isn’t a hard task to accomplish. All it takes is clicking the “Like” icon on comments or pinning a helpful comment to content. Many seasoned YouTubers often go out of their way to respond to comments too, which is positive.
To engage your audience more effectively, you can as well start an Audience question and answer session. This has proven to be one of the most effective means of engaging followers on YouTube. Subscribers get to ask questions and give their opinions about content and you get to respond to them all either via comments or even through dedicated video content.
Engagements have shown that it can help increase watch time, views as well as subscribers counts. It becomes easy to build decent followership since potential subscribers know they are part of the journey.
Utilize Descriptive, True, and Concise Titles
One factor that can damage a channel’s followership is using misleading titles to attract an audience. The title, as well as the thumbnail, is the first thing audiences will see when they come in contact with your content. So keeping it true, descriptive enough, and concise to the content is extremely important.
You also want to keep it short as possible while maintaining attractiveness. To help with that, consider some of the tips below:
- Keep it short and sweet. The most popular YouTube videos tend to have the shortest titles. Stick to 60 characters or less or some of your title may get cut off when displayed.
- Include your keyword(s) in the first half of the title to avoid losing valuable information. Most online readers focus on the beginning of the sentence and skip the rest.
- Engaging doesn’t mean clickbait. The best headlines offer an obvious benefit or create an emotional reaction. Click-bait is tempting but can damage your channel’s reputation in the long term.
If you are having trouble creating the perfect titles for your content, simply use YouTube’s autocomplete feature. It helps you find popular keywords that are concise and it’s simple to use. Simply type in a specific theme or topic, and it generates related autosuggest titles for you.
Leverage Brand Partnerships
Another method on how to build a YouTube following is to create strategic partnerships with relevant brands. This helps your increase your reach organically as well as capture new subscribers for yourself. Also, branded content can be a useful tool to work with when you run out of ideas, and trust us, it happens to even the best of creators.
Not all brand partnerships are good for your YouTube business but finding the brand that closely resonates with your content is on the way of searching. After that, creating authentic and real content around the brand is the most important consideration. This is because if you essentially become part of the brand and your reputation is affected should a promotion go sideways.
Identify brands that reflect your personality and your audience’s needs. Does it make sense to partner with them? Will it provide value to your viewers? A classic example of a brand partnership that works is that between Tasty and Sun-Maid which is fun, relevant, and useful.
Run a Contest or Giveaway
We don’t think there is a social media platform on earth where its users don’t enjoy contests and giveaways. Thankfully, YouTube is no different. Another tip on how to build a YouTube following is to simply host a contest or giveaway. This should be geared towards encouraging the audience to subscribe to your channel, engage your channel, or reward loyal subscribers.
Contests or giveaway tasks could be as simple as asking audiences to like your video, leave a comment and subscribe to your channel to enter. It could also be as complex as having participants generate user content for your channel. Be that as it may, you might have to ensure that it complies with several best practices:
- Ensure your contests and giveaways don’t run afoul of YouTube’s policies.
- The prizes should be as relevant as possible to your channel values and content. This is to ensure that participants aren’t just interested in winning the prize.
- Get creative by incorporating user-generated content and other non-traditional entry requirements.
- Extend your content to other social media platforms to drive traffic to your YouTube channel for maximum effect.
A caveat to hosting giveaways on YouTube is to ensure that the channel is getting the necessary results from your efforts. If not, you could incur costs in terms of money and resources.
One way to ensure maximum returns is to always carefully examine metrics such as view rate, bounce rate, subscriber drop-off rate, and engagement numbers. This will essentially force you to give ample breaks before hosting new contests.
Conclusion
On the topic of how to build a YouTube following, we have examined some of the most successful methods of accomplishing the task. While it is good to state that this list is by no means exhaustive, creators should study each carefully.
Many of the tips are proven to work and will always most certainly require adequate input on the part of YouTubers. But if you are determined to grow decent followership on YouTube, you can be sure of success in a short time.
