One thing Youtubers are always concerned about is their YouTube engagement rate, and in this article, I will be discussing what it is and how to get YouTube views with it.
About YouTube
YouTube is an online platform for streaming videos of every kind; from video clips to movies – short or full version, movie trailers, music videos – either the official videos or the cover videos, live streams, or videos blogs. Just name it!
So, you would agree with me, that it isn’t out of place to call it an online video platform. YouTube is the largest online video platform and it is owned by Google.
It is also the second-largest search engine in the world having several products like YouTube music, YouTube TV, YouTube premium, and the YouTube Kids with billions of viewers. The platform has reached out to billions of users across several countries bringing a community of YouTube families ever since its inception in 2005.
Just 16 years after, it has evolved into a very large community of people all connected via videos. It is commonly said that the brain holds on to information that is exposed to it through visual aids more than those exposed through auditory aides or any other.
This truth, YouTube has so powerfully harnessed with its different genres of video content uploaded at every second of the day. These videos expressing people’s thoughts, fears, faith, happiness, sadness, beliefs, and opinions drawing up a community of people sharing a common bond.
YouTube is said to have in total, a users’ watch of more than one billion hours of videos each day.
To become a YouTuber, and belong to this very influencing online video community, you have to start by creating an account with your Google details, after which you can start uploading your videos.
Videos that have been uploaded directly on YouTube or through any other social media platforms and websites by other users can then be viewed. These videos can either be downloaded for offline viewing, liked, commented on, or shared.
An exciting feature about the YouTube platform is that users can create a personal channel on it like a YouTube TV. The users are then referred to as YouTubers or YouTube channel owners who can later grow to become YouTube influencers.
On this channel, videos of whatever kinds are uploaded with the targeted audience in view. The YouTuber gets to upload video content ranging from educational to comics, live streams, music, or whatever creativity he has rolled up on his sleeves on his channel.
In doing this, he creates a move, pulling a unit out of the community of families. This unit is being held by a cohesive force of attraction; the attraction here is/are the videos.
Now, this is where the YouTubers would be saddled with the responsibility of growing their community and this can only be done efficiently by observing your YouTube engagement rate.
Which brings us to the question, what is the YouTube engagement rate? However, before we look into that, we first have to take a look at YouTube engagement.
What is YouTube Engagement?
The YouTube engagement is solely between the YouTuber – one who has created a YouTube channel, and his audience.
Now a YouTuber, like I stated earlier is one who has been saddled with the responsibility of growing his YouTube community. He could do that by ensuring that videos are always uploaded to the community on a regular basis.
The captivating the videos get, the more views you will have as a YouTuber, and the more you would be able to establish an interaction with your community members.
These interactions from your audience can come up in different ways such as comments, likes and dislikes, shares, and subscribing or not subscribing. It is these interactions that are referred to as your YouTube engagement.
Let’s talk about these YouTube interactions a little.
Comments
Your viewers will get to pen down their emotions on the comment section created below your posted video. They get to give either a positive or a negative comment depending on sentiments. This will tell you if their emotions resonate with your video content or not.
Likes and dislikes
This can be a good yardstick to know if your video content synchronizes with the emotions of your audiences or not. The number of thumbs up and thumbs down will give you a preview of your viewers’ reactions.
Shares
This will show how often your viewers share your video content and also on what platform it was shared; say a social platform (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or a messenger platform (WhatsApp, email, etc.).
This is the most important metric for YouTube engagement because it shows how engaging your video gets.
Subscribing or Not Subscribing
Remember I said that people can subscribe to a YouTube channel? The contents of your video (how captivating it is or how resourceful or reliable it is) will fetch you subscribers or make you lose subscribers.
All these are the various and important ways you can get to view your YouTube engagement.
YouTube Engagement Rate
Now, the YouTube engagement rate will then be the measuring of these engagements. It is the addition of the total number of likes, dislikes, and comments for all the videos put up in a YouTube channel divided by the total number of channel subscribers.
Better still, using the most common methods of measuring your YouTube engagement rate, YouTube engagement rate can be measured by reach (ERR). This is done by considering your percentage of viewers who have interacted with your video after seeing it
Let’s put this in a mathematical form,
YouTube engagement rate (ERR) = (Likes + Comments + Shares) / Subscribers
ERR = total engagements per post/ reach per post * 100
After this, you then have to get the average by summing up all the ERRs from the posts you want to average and then, dividing them by the number of posts:
Average ERR = total ERR / total posts
This gives you a solid view of how engaging your videos are all across and it is not restricted to your viewers only. The engagement tab gives you defined details about your YouTube channel’s interactions with your audience.
Therefore, the way people interact with your videos, your posting of controversial videos, how long people watch your videos, changes to YouTube’s algorithm, all affect your YouTube engagement rates.
What is a good engagement rate?
Well-analyzed reports show that metrics that score at the 60th percentile or higher than that are considered good. For example, should your YouTube account have an average of 80.5% in like to dislike rate, then it is good as it falls in this percentile.
Also, should your YouTube account have a view-to subscriber rate (should you had followed the first step of calculating the ratio of the number of views to the number of channel subscribers) of 33.1% or higher, then you are also at a good range.
Accounts that have a rate of 0.05% or higher for the comment to view metric are likewise performing at a good range and those with at least a 3.74% rate in like to views are also good.
How to Get YouTube Views with The Engagement Rates?
What is the essence of knowledge when not properly applied? I wonder! My well-wrapped gift box sure got you covered.
Since YouTube categorizes channel performances based on their engagement rates, you as a YouTuber, in calculating your YouTube engagement rate should ensure that you meet up with the good range percentile or ratio.
This will mean that your videos must be well engaged in by your viewers.
I know it will demand more from you but as earlier said, this is your family unit and the very best is what they deserve… nothing good ever comes easy sweetie.
How to Increase YouTube Engagement Rate?
Being an influencer YouTuber, where your YouTube views are increased and your channel so well engaged on is the dream of every YouTube channel owner. This dream can become a reality but would require time and effort from you and if done rightly, you will be rewarded in the long run.
Here are some steps you can take in realizing that dream of yours:
Have a Quality Description
Having a quality description on your video content works better to inform the search engine and users what your video is all about. Your description should be short but interesting enough to capture the hearts of your viewers.
Optimize Your Thumbnail Image
The thumbnail image is the main image capture of your video, like the hero image. It should be creatively done and capturing as it is at its first glance, reveals to the viewer what is expected.
You should ensure that your thumbnail image should be of high quality, making it very clear.
Create Transcripts of Your Videos
It will surprise you that people love to read as they watch; so why not harness the power in this? You can give transcriptions of your video contents making it easy to view.
Your transcriptions should be well structured grammatically and easy to read.
Provide Contents that Educates, Entertains or Both
Providing video content that either educates or entertains or both is one of the ways to increase your YouTube engagement rate.
People like to learn and entertainment is one effective way they can.
Now in this aspect, you must ensure to develop a niche for yourself. What would it be? Education, music, blogs, cartoons, or whatever aspect you would want to settle on and be known for. Build that niche and consistently put out materials under it and watch it grow.
Use Auto Plays
Making your videos play automatically is one way to get more views, thereby increasing your YouTube engagement rates. Remember, the more people who get to view your videos could lead to engaging your content either by liking or disliking, commenting, sharing, or subscribing to your page.
Who knows, chances could be that your content may contain answers that they had long sorted for.
So you cannot afford to not go all out and get your viewers satisfied.
Does watching a video more than once count as views?
The count of views on YouTube is dependent on the viewer’s deliberate actions of watching a video and also if he watches it on the platform for at least 30 seconds.
Now if you skip through a video but have the total time of which you did mounting up to 30 seconds or more, the view will count and if not, it will not count.
Also, repeated views do count, however, to a certain point. According to research, after 4 or 5 views of a particular video in a day, YouTube stops adding new views to a video’s view count number.
Conclusion
For every achievement, there is a price to be paid. Difficult? I don’t think so.
However, gaining a lot of engagements to increase your YouTube engagement rate takes time.
It is a process and will require you to the patient as you scale up the ladder but with the right build, it is reachable.
