Some YouTube tips that will help you grow your channel... a thread... (please feel free to retweet and share if you find useful).

1. Understand SEO. YouTube is a search engine. Your video titles, descriptions, subtitles (so adding your own subtitles is quite useful for growth!), and tags are all SEO-able. Make sure that your channel also has its own “channel tags” set.

2. Hub, Hero, Hygiene/Help. This is a content strategy which can help you grow. In a nutshell it refers to 3 types of content. Hero - big ass videos that could potentially go viral. Hub - videos for your community. Help - videos on topics that people search, like a question.

3. Analytics. These are helpful, but also potentially very toxic. Those big fat red arrows can make us feel like crap. Instead, ignore your analytics and focus on engaging with your audience. “Heart” their comments so they know you’ve read them, or even better, comment back!

4. Focus on the people subbed to you instead of those who aren’t. You know what makes your subs feel like crap? Not feeling appreciated & seeing you complain about not having enough subs or views. Show the people who DO sub to your channel some love & appreciation. Focus on them!

5. YouTube’s algo is based on watch time, NOT VIEWS. It’s wise to make longer videos, but not unnecessarily long. Check your video watch time in your analytics to see if there are any points where people typically drop off. It’s normal for people to watch about 60-50% of a video.

6. YouTube tends to push videos that are more family friendly. So if you swear a lot or show a lot of NSFW content, mention sex, show gore, violence, etc. then your videos won’t get recommended as often to people on the platform.

7. Show your face (if relevant). And for god’s sake LOOK AT THE LENS, NOT THE VIEW FINDER. By looking into the lens, you’re looking at your audience and forming a better connection. Also, remember, people connect with people. So having your face SOMEWHERE is sometimes important.

8. Watch other people’s videos for research. Write down things you like about their channel and things you don’t. Be specific. Start to apply the points you like about their videos and change the things you don’t like to what you’d like to see, then apply them to your content.

9. Make content you enjoy. At the end of the day, this is YOUR channel and you should never ever become a slave to your viewers. Once your joy for creating dies, people will notice this and just move onto the next creator to watch their videos instead.

10. Last one (I may add more later), thumbnails are SO important. Research has shown that thumbnails with red arrows/banners and people with open mouths get more clicks (no idea why, but I’ve also tested this and it’s worked). Notice the kind of thumbnails you click on too.