If you saw our post What is YouTube Engagement, and Why Engagement On Your YouTube Videos is Important?, we talked about the things that YouTube considers "Engagement" and what makes engagement so important.
There are a handful of things that constitute engagement on a YouTube video:
- How many people are subscribing to your channel after watching - See post here
- How many viewers share your content
- Number of likes and dislikes (who is liking it is also important) - See post here
- Number and quality of comments
- Viewer retention
To sum up the importance of engagement on your YouTube videos, it's one of the key factors that determine how high YouTube's algorithms will rank your video. I'm not just talking about ranking in search either. Even more important is how often your videos are being recommended to users after they finish watching a different video.
How to increase YouTube engagement
Above, we listed five things that you need to focus on when it comes to increasing your video engagement. In the upcoming posts, we're going to address those things one at a time, so you can learn how to increase all five factors of engagement. This post is focusing on getting your video shared.
Getting your content shared
YouTube looks for social signals to determine a video's popularity and one of those things that they look for is how often your videos are shared. It's tough to get a piece of content shared, so how do you do it? First, grab the low-hanging fruit.
Share it yourself
Share the video on your Twitter and Facebook, send it to your email list, and send it directly to anyone who might be interested. Include the video in your Steemit post like I'm about to do here, and write a post on Medium that links to your video. Every share counts!
Don't underestimate the power of including your videos in your Steemit and Medium blog posts. Shares and backlinks are great indicators to YouTube that your video should be ranked higher, especially if they're coming from high-authority websites (like Steemit and Medium).
Grow your social media following
This is one area where we've at Tangerine Travels have been lacking in our efforts. We really need to put more focus on growing our Facebook page so we can get our videos shared.
If you share your YouTube video on your Facebook page but your page doesn't have a very large or engaged audience, you're probably not going to get many people sharing your Facebook post. However, if you also put a lot of effort into growing your Facebook and engaging with your audience there, you'll be giving yourself another platform from which to get a lot of shares.
Remember, YouTube views social media shares as a positive and will rank your video higher if you get those shares.
Call to action
In your video, ask your viewers to share it on their social media. Reminding people to share your video helps a lot to get your content out there and it also sends those positive social signals to YouTube.