Know How to Get More Subscribers on YouTube

Social media marketing is a vital tool in the digital marketing arsenal that helps get more targeted traffic to your website. The wide reach and influence that social media enjoys is a boon that any business can, and must, harness in its quest for more sales and subscribers. However, the key to winning at social media lies in producing good content; content that inspires your audience holds their attention and most importantly, makes a direct connection with your brand or website.

YouTube is one of the most important social media networks today. To understand the extent of its popularity, let’s take a look at some stats associated with it.

  • Over 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. By the time you’ve reached the end of this blog, over 1500 hours of video would have been uploaded to YouTube.
  • Close to 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day.
  • YouTube gets more than 30 million unique visitors every day.
  • The average number of views for YouTube on mobile is 1 billion.
  • YouTube reaches more people in the 18-34 and 18-49 age groups than any other cable network in America.
  • By 2025, it’s reported that half the people under the age of 32 will not subscribe to any cable service.

These are some extraordinary stats, especially the last two. Those two points are an indicator of why traditional advertising is on the decline and why digital marketing is advantageous for businesses. And while both Facebook and Twitter have upped their video marketing game, YouTube’s massive starter advantage ensures that it stays ahead of the curve. This is unlikely to change in the near future.

Good video content has the potential to convert a viewer into a future paying customer/subscriber. So if you’re looking to increase your YouTube subscriber count, the points explained below might hold you in good stead.

  1. Plan your videos

Start off by deciding what kind of content you want to publish. Decide the theme of your channel and stick to it. The characters and dialogs (if any) in your video should contribute towards optimum conversion. Furthermore, your video will come out a lot better if you base it on a script. Scripts help organize your videos and lend a degree of coherence to the final outcome. This is important as you don’t want your videos to veer off topic and waste the viewer’s time.

  1. Create engaging content

YouTube is a great medium to engage with your target audience. However, to achieve meaningful engagement, you need to create content that is informative and entertaining. Your video should hold the viewer’s interest, failing which you lose out on a potential future customer. Keep an eye on the kind of videos that are created for your niche. They point to what works best for your niche. Do all this regularly enough and your YouTube subscriber list is bound to grow quickly.

  1. Upload videos frequently

One of the most effective ways of getting more subscribers is to create and upload videos on your channel frequently. Keep in mind that when a person subscribes to your channel, he/she does so in the belief that you will keep producing quality content on a frequent basis. YouTube offers thousands of alternatives to its users so if your uploading frequency is poor, they are likely to look elsewhere. Ideally, you should create a schedule for posting new videos and stick to it religiously. This creates a sense of anticipation among your subscribers and helps in increasing the view count on your videos.

  1. Optimize video title

Even videos can be optimized to be search engine friendly. Adding suitable titles to your videos qualifies them for SEO advantages. Your videos will show up more often in searches, which increases your view count while reaching new audiences.

For starters, identify keyword(s) related to your niche and include them in the title of your video. However, ensure these titles are not too long as Google limits the number of characters in the title to 66. Further, it also adds the prefix ‘YouTube|’ to all search results, which takes away another 10 characters from the above limit. Ideally speaking, keep your video titles to less than 50 characters but make sure they are descriptive and offer a tasty sneak peek.

  1. Customize your channel

An example of channel customization on YouTube is when you organize all your videos in a category that enables users to select the pick of the week. Other areas where you can customize your YouTube channel include adding a custom background image that features either your business or website, adding a creatively written bio, creating a custom URL etc.

  1. Personalize video thumbnails

YouTube users have been shown to respond positively to customized thumbnails. Such thumbnails not only increase engagement but can also boost your subscriber base. An example of video thumbnail personalization is using an innovative message or text to describe a video instead of sticking to the default preview of the video. Viewers will notice that you have gone the extra mile to make their experience better and might just return their appreciation with a subscription to your channel.

  1. Create a fantastic trailer

One of the best features of YouTube is the channel trailer feature which allows a viewer to learn about your channel through a short video. This is good as not all viewers might have the time or the interest to visit your bio page and read what your channel is about. Use the trailer feature to talk in brief about your channel or website, what does your business do, what are the products and services you offer etc. The trailer should make you look good. As such, consider this as a self-pitch.

  1. Use an appropriate call to action annotations

A call to action annotation is the popup that appears on YouTube videos suggesting you take an action. Although most users find it annoying and YouTube itself offers an option to disable it, using the feature smartly can help add value to a viewer’s experience on YouTube.

Numerous YouTubers have reported massive increases in their subscription counts once they started using an appropriate call to action annotations in their videos. The key is to not be obtrusive. Look to add to the viewer’s overall experience and not take away from it. Using annotations wisely is also a good way to keep a new viewer on your channel longer and nudge them into exploring your other videos or even your website.

  1. Limit the videos to less than 5 minutes 

Remember that you are competing with hundreds, or even thousands, of other businesses and websites to attract and hold onto subscribers. This makes it imperative that you limit the length of your videos to under 5 minutes. Sure, once you get a toehold and a decent number of subscribers, experimenting with your video length is perfectly alright. However, do not risk turning away a viewer because of a lengthy video if your channel is just starting out.

  1. Write unique & SEO friendly video descriptions

You should never leave your description box empty or use the same description across all the videos on your channel. Write a unique description for every video you upload. Also, keep the descriptions search engine friendly. In other words, write descriptions that are useful to your viewer and get your videos a high ranking on search engines. This might sound similar to writing SEO friendly copy for your websites and it indeed is.

To conclude, the mantra to succeeding on YouTube and gaining more subscribers is to produce quality videos, upload them regularly, write SEO friendly titles and descriptions for them, customize your channel along the lines of your website and brand, and keep them short and to the point.

Or, you can also outsource the whole thing to another agency that does all that for you. At eLuminous, we are one such digital marketing company and know how to make the most of your YouTube presence. We also offer social media marketing services that are specifically tailored to businesses.