How to Promote A YouTube Video
While the title is a bit of a clickbait, this is out experience for promoting videos on YouTube. Here are the steps we took to get a video 5,000 views in a month with constant growth.
The video I am talking about here is this 144Hz vs 60Hz Showdown video we did a month ago. I made this video mostly due to a lack of other content around the topic (like seriously, there wasn’t anything even half decent around) and of course as usual I spent ages promoting the hell out of it once it was up. Here is the kicker – promotion can be slow acting – after 3 weeks we had around 1,500 views, which happened to be a bit less than our average video view count. Then, as-if-by-magic, the video gained 3,700 views in less than a week – bringing us to now. (not shown in the graph as YouTube is rather slow to update, as of writing the video has a total of 5360 views).
The video, as seen in the graphs below, we went from about 25 views a day, to an average of 300, with about 750 minutes watched too. As you can see we have a decent amount of likes (which are growing) and a good number of comments, shares and subscribers too. Of course, this isn’t a huge success, and it isn’t our most popular video by far( that reign is held by out Windows 8|Why PC Users Hate It video with over 112,000 views), but it shows the power of promotion and allowed me to make a good starting point with plenty of evidence for this article.
How Did We Do It?
For Free.
Ok, so now I have your attention – we honestly didn’t pay a cent for the views and growth of this video, or any other public video on our channel. The best way we have found to increase views and traction on a video is by talking to people. Whether it is real life, on social media or on forums, talking to people is honestly the best way to get genuine fans to your video, and enjoy your content. For all those who don’t care about genuine fans and just want the big number, this post isn’t for you.
Now to be clear, you have probably heard this before – but the difference is here I’m going to go into detail about how to talk to people, especially online, as it can be difficult to know where to get started.
Here is where you should probably focus your effort:
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Twitter
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Facebook
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Forums
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Pinterest/Reddit/Real life
Twitter is a great way to get in touch with people, especially ones you don’t know and have never spoken to before. At first I was a bit intimidated by the sheer volume of people and number of tweets, so was difficult to get started. The easiest way to speak to people is to search in a relevant topic to your video, in this case it was ‘PC gaming’, or ‘144Hz’ or even specific products relating to your videos. Once you found real people (not bots or news/business accounts) talking about your topic, I found the easiest way to get interaction – especially onto your videos – is to join an existing conversation. Say someone is talking about their new PC build, I would then reply to that post saying something like, ‘Awesome PC, did you build it yourself?’, and start talking. Once I’m comfortable with them and vice versa, I might mention our video(s), and ask them what they think. People love it when you listen (genuinely listen) to what they say, so ask them and get them talking! Lots of easy to answer open questions make it easy to reply and makes the conversation feel genuine and rewarding.
Another way is if you feature someone’s product in your video, for example in our 144Hz Vs 60Hz video, we featured a BenQ and an AOC monitor, along with a Yoyotech PC, so I tweeted to all three asking them to share the video – and guess what? They did! Companies love other people shouting about their products as it is all part of their marketing, and the more people hear about their stuff, the better!
Facebook is a lot more of a tricky beast, and one that is much more of a Pay-to-play system. You can still tag companies when posting (heavily recommended) but you won’t really be reaching too many new people through the platform yourself, or even many existing people (Veritasium video explaining what I mean). Honestly, the best thing to do is get as many people as you can to like and comment on your posts, ask engaging questions and don’t just post all about you, through some interesting or funny stuff up too, as well as vary the content – such as pictures, videos and text posts.
Forums
Forums are a difficult nut to crack, and one I don’t think I am fully capable of de-shelling for you. The best way really is to get stuck into relevant forums, become a genuine member, talk to people and interact on posts, and generally promote your stuff in a ratio of 20:1, 20 genuine posts for every 1 you post about your videos. It is incredibly hard to do, takes a lot of time and you really need to be good with talking to lots of people, but if you get it right, you can get a lot of fans who already know you well from the forums!
Pinterest/Reddit/Real life
The reason I group these together is mostly because I deem them all as important as each other. Real life is great as you, on your day to day, can drop hints to people about your channel, or talk about the videos themselves. The best thing you can do to promote videos in real life is honestly to go to events and talk to people. Carry business cards with your channel name or link and chat to people. For us this would be Multiplay LAN (which we are going to!), or CES/Computex/PAX. It can be expensive, time consuming and hard to do, but damn it’s fun – and you get to meet new people, gain new fans and have a great time!
Reddit is a whole other kind of forum… I generally just post a link in a subreddit that lets me link straight to videos, and run away – they can be vicious dogs, or warm and cosy – and it can be tough waging into the comments. For the strong hearted, go for it! Chat with people, get engaged and still follow the 20:1 rule!
Finally Pinterest. It doesn’t really suit us, so we don’t talk about it much, but for artsy type youtubers, it is great. Add everything you can to boards and pin other peoples’ stuff to your (non-content) boards. If you have any more tips about pinterest, let me know in the comments below.
Final Note
While promotion is great, you do need to make sure you have great content that you can promote. Make sure you are promoting to the right audience, and really my advice is talk to people. If you talk to people, you get a bond which you can then use to gain more subscribers/followers/likes e.t.c. It also makes you feel super good when your fans tweet stuff at you like ‘These guys make some of the most underrated content on YouTube’ and ‘It’s not just the content quality I love, it’s the production quality and everything!’ and you have no words to say except a whole lot of thank yous!
