YouTube’s recent changes to combat spammers has opened up a whole new world of possibilitys to engage your audience & get more views, likes & comments for your videos with the YouTube hack I am about to teach you.
A lot of people have complained about the integration with Google+ but if you dig a little bit deeper you will see how we can use this to our advantage.
So if you have already read my YouTube marketing guide it is time to take it to the next level!
Table Of Contents [show]
What You Will Learn
- The YouTube hack to get more views, comments & likes
- How to find & engage your top fans
- How to take advantage of recent YouTube changes
- How to add your fans to Google+ automatically
This is a guest post by YouTube pro Philip Zeplin who runs his own channel about Japan along with NovelConcept.org.
Staying in touch with your followers on social media or through your website is becoming increasingly important.
You can find a ton of great articles on how to reach your fans (and how not to) and there’s a lot of great software like Buzzbundle to help you.
But these tend to focus on social media accounts like Twitter and Facebook.
But what about YouTube?
Why YouTube Must Not Be Ignored
You might be saying “I don’t care about YouTube”, and if you did you are leaving a lot of money on the table.
Based on pure numbers YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine behind Google. YouTube is the third most visited website in the world according to Alexa.
Philip DeFranco, owner of DeFranco Inc (running channels such as SxePhil, SourceFed, ForHumanPeoples, and more) pays himself $100k a year and now owns a company of around 50 people.
He is 28 and started out with a webcam ranting about the news 6 years ago.
Every minute over 60 hours of video is uploaded to the site and in march 2013 it reached 1 billion unique visitors in a single month.
With those numbers it is clear that you should not be ignoring YouTube.
Interacting with Fans
Once you’ve created your YouTube account (and your obligatory Google+ Profile, these days) and uploaded some videos you will slowly start getting subscribers and fans.
In my case, I rebooted my channel a little less than a year ago and currently sit neat with 2,000 subscribers.
Staying in touch with your fans on YouTube is very important.
Users interacting on your video such as liking, subscribing, favoriting, and commenting, among other things is a key metric that YouTube uses in ranking videos in its searches.
And as noted above, YouTube gets a lot of searches.
Interacting with your fans also makes them keep coming back for more. It makes sense, in the same way that a good blogger replies to the comments on his or her blog for instance.
Most people do this simply by replying to the comments on their videos but we can take advantage of recent YouTube changes to do much bigger things.
While (justifiably, perhaps) many dislike the new integration with Google+ it has brought a ton of great community features.
We are going to use these new features to our advantage.
Find Your Fans With My YouTube Hack
The first thing we want to do is to find a list of all of our fans on YouTube.
Just go to YouTube and click on your channel name in the top right. After that, click Video Manager.
On the next page on the left side of your screen you will see a tab called Community – click it, this is where the pot of gold is hiding.
This will show you a list of people who have interacted with your videos.
The key here is it is a list of people that have interacted with your videos, NOT just your Subscribers. It doesn’t list every single person, only the most influential, and is updated daily.
On this page you can set up various “rules” to filter who you want to see such as whether they are in a G+ circle, how long they have been subscribed and so forth.
The two things we’re interested in though is engagement and subscribers each for their own reasons.
Secret YouTube Subscribers Hack – Engaging The Engaged
First we’ll look at engagement. Click on the button called Sort by and select Engagement.
What you’ve got is a list of people that tend to interact with your videos a lot – essentially, great fans. The most engaged are at the top and the least on the bottom.
YouTube doesn’t give us the exact details about who these people are but as far as I can tell the list tends to vary a lot from time to time and it doesn’t show everyone.
My channel has close to 2000 subscribers and my list of Fans is only 100 people.
It’s also a little strange how these people are picked as my channel gets comments on a daily basis but only 6 people with recent comments are shown.
Nonetheless we know that these people are people that have recently been actively engaged with your channel.
Why Is This Awesome?
First off if you use any kind of YouTube bot you now have the usernames of your best fans.
YouTube’s subscription system is notorious for failing to show all your subscribers your new video uploads so now if you upload a new video, you can add in these usernames and ensure that your top fans get a personal message about the video.
Not only will that make them feel pretty damn cool and part of the “awesome inner circle” but it will also ensure that you get your video out to people who are likely to interact with it.
And interacting means better rankings, which means more views. It is a great ‘seed’ to get things going.
If they have their Google+ profile connected (which the vast majority does now) YouTube has made it super easy to post a message to their profile.
In this message you can include links, videos, and photos. If you run a channel that is centred around affiliate marketing, this could be an absolute goldmine for you.
Targeting The Top Dogs
Remember I also talked about sorting by Subscribers? Let’s take a look at how to use that to our advantage quickly.
Same as before click on Sort by but now you choose Subscribers instead of “Engagement”.
Contrary to what you might think, this isn’t about your subscribers, but theirsubscribers!
I highly suggest you pop back and check this often as the list tends to change a lot!
Currently my list holds a person with 1000 subscribers and 5 with over 100 subscribers. 2 weeks ago I spotted one with 7k subscribers so keep an eye out!
Why is this great information?
Because you now know people that are interested in your videos, and have a following of their own. If you’re looking to gain more subscribers this is a great list to have.
You can message them about video collaborations, shout outs and all the other good stuff! And you can do this knowing that they have already watched your videos!
It’s like writing an email to another blog owner that you know have followers and fans on their blog AND also read your blog.
With YouTube, you get that list of people free of charge in 2 clicks.
How To Use The List
On my old channel TokyoZeplin I used to do quite a lot of huge collaborations with other users (20+ in a single video).
This is an example of how I use these lists-
Come up with a great idea for a big collaboration. On my old channel this was “What do you find sexy about Japan?” (it was a Japan themed channel).
The ones who wish to collaborate, then send you a small clip saying what they find sexy.
Once you get a few responses you can mix this together in a longer video, add some nice editing, some music and bamf, great video!
What do they get out of it? Well you will include their channel name in the video whenever they appear on-screen with a linked annotation along with a link in the description.
When contacting them make sure that you ask or set as a requirement that they make a short video linking to yours when it’s uploaded.
This is a win-win for everyone.
You get tons of links and viewers to your video from all the other channels.
As the video gets more popular the other channels also gain more publicity from everyone linking to it by seeing them on screen and following back to their own channels afterwards.
If you’re not very good at editing there’s a ton of great free tutorials on all editing programs on YouTube.
But if you don’t have the time to learn I would suggest hopping over to the YTtalk forums and making a thread about your project.
There’s a lot of semi-desperate YouTubers there that would love a chance to get a link/mention in the video in return for editing it together.
You can also contact users about creating a video for their channel much like you would contact a blogger about a guest post on their blog.
Creating a Google+ Circle
Last but not least you can also create a G+ Circle with your top fans in it automatically through the Community tab.
While in the tab, click on Insights. If it’s your first time doing it you’ll be prompted to create a G+ circle so just do that, and wait while it gathers information.
It seems to have limited advantages right now as it only adds your top 10 fans. I’m assuming that later on YouTube will expand it or make it easier to continually add more fans to the list.
Once the list is created however you’ll get information on what other channels your fans usually watch, what other videos they seem interested in and some demographic information.
Essentially a breakdown of your top fans and their interests. Since it’s only 10 its limited to what you can do but it’s a feature I would keep an eye on!
It is also worth noting that at the moment you can only access the fans tab if you have 1,000 subscribers or more.
Wrapping It Up
YouTubes new changes are great for outreach and makes finding engaged fans easy. It makes for a great, easy to use YouTube hack to grow your channel.
You can use it to ensure your fans watch your latest videos, get comments/likes, connect easily with them on G+ and find great chances for collaboration with “YouTube guest posting” so to speak.
Lastly you can use it to gain insight into what other channels and videos your users tend to find interesting which is great information when choosing your next video topic!
So if you’re starting up your YouTube channel and career or just use YouTube as a supplement to your website/blog, I highly suggest you take advantage of the YouTube hack you have learned today.
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