In the past weeks, I have been trying to develop my channel on youtube. It's a channel where first I intended to write about online business but ended up mainly producing content about AI image and video generation.
I have been a content creator on Hive for quite a long time and I started to do videos a couple of years back. I believe to be able to reach a wider audience, we need to fork out to traditional social media to be able to bring people to hive in the long run. That is the basic idea for reactivating my account after a lot of years of idleness. My plan is to learn with this account and then implement what I have learned into the project that I run with @ph1102 that we just started and which is called Telios Lens. It's a side project of Liotes with which we want to create a bridge between the outside world and our Hive community.
I write this post to share what I have learned so far and also to get back to it at a later stage when I need it.
About Youtube
The big difference between youtube and 3speak is that on Youtube there are millions of new videos that are created every day and there are also millions of users watching them. 3Speak is a great platform but the quantity of videos that are created is limited and it's much easier to stand out and generate interaction. I've felt quite comfortable to work with 3speak and it's a great service but I don't really need much to touch the audience that is following me already on Hive. Also, I have the need to touch a broader audience and for that it's necessary to play in a different league and why I need to work with Youtube.
The things that I have learned so far mainly came from other authors and my own experience:
The packaging matters
The youtube algorithm looks at two metrics which are click-through rate, which is the number of times somebody clicks on the thumbnail of your video and the retention rate, the amount of time that somebody spends watching your video. However, there can't be any retention rate if people don't watch the video in the first place so the single most important aspect to get views is to make people click on your video thumbnail. To reach clicks, the packaging is the most important aspect of your video. It comprehends the title and the thumbnail image. The secret is to find the perfect title that arouses people's curiosity and a thumbnail that transmits it as well as possible.
Thumbnail images
Here are some things that I learned about how to create a thumbnail:
The thumbnail image should contain no more than 3 elements. The most successful thumbnails contain an image of the creator in which he mirrors the emotion that the title suggest. Then there is some clear text that should trigger the curiosity of the user and maybe a smaller subtitle or a logo that represents the content that the video is about. Let's say, you make a video about hive, you could put a hive logo.
The Title
What matters most with the title is the choice of words. They should arouse interest and be easily understandable so to reach a wider audience. If you make a video about science and you had the choice between a title like 'the chemical reaction of NaCl and frozen H2O' and 'how salt melts snow', it's safe to say that the second title would appeal to a much broader audience and therefore be more successful.
The retention rate
Once somebody clicks on your thumbnail, you should make sure that this person stays and watches your video by providing everything that you will explain in the video in the first 20 – 30 seconds. Basically you want to reinforce the choice of the person who clicked your video. If the person gets what he will learn in short time and stays interested, your video will be pushed up more by the algorithm of youtube. Therefore the first seconds matter the most and a high content density should be targeted, meaning a lot of meaning in as few words as possible should be transmitted.
A good way to create this retention rate is to create a shock, that is engineered by a gap between what is commonly accepted and what you propose. For example you could start like: 'If you are not earning money while playing games on your smartphone, you need to watch this video'. You create a kind of shock because most people are not aware that they could be paid to play games on their smartphone.
The channel content consistency matters
Contrary to other platforms on youtube it matters that your content aims at a given target group and that the content is of consistent in quality and content. I thought that if I made a channel and that people like what they do, they would follow me but the algorithm doesn't work like that. Youtube defines the niche of my content and then presents it to a target public. Youtube wants me to enlarge this target public through my content and reinforce the message through my videos. If now I switch the topic, my videos will be presented to the wrong target group, there will be little views and the algorithm will push my content down. The same is the case if I make a low quality video. To be successful with youtube, we need to define the target group of people that we want to talk to and consistently offer them interesting content. If we want to speak about different topics, it might be better to create several accounts.
The disadvantage of small channels
When we scroll through our youtube feed, we are also influenced by the number of views a video gets and how many subscriber a content creator has. This is a normal social biais that we have to live with. For starting channels, it's therefore more difficult to get views and we need to build up this social acceptance for our channel.
These are the main things that I want to remember so far from what I learned with youtube. I will try to stick more to it in the future and try to get better. I will write a post later on to share how my progress is going.
Do you find this content useful?
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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