Understanding Social Media is Key to Promoting a Successful YouTube Channel or Vlog

Learn more about the major social media sites and the key to being successful on each one, through both organic and paid content.

Guide to Promoting Your YouTube channel or Vlog on Social Media

As we begin to move into 2019, it has become imperative that vloggers use social media if they want to have a chance at staying relevant in the ever-digitizing content creation marketplace. Thanks to the audience being increasingly inundated with massive amounts of content on a daily basis, you not only have to be creating social media content to funnel audiences to your vlog but you also must figure out a way of cutting through the noise and reaching your target audience in a unique way, among them being a high quality camera for YouTube. Let’s discuss some of these in more detail:

Why Should Your Viewers Follow You In The First Place?

They are already viewing your content but you understand that in order to grow their loyalty, you’ll need to hit them on the other platforms as well. But ask yourself: why should they follow you in the first place? What kind of value are you offering them when they could be interacting with someone else’s channel? Once you are able to answer these questions, you’ll be better able to start generating ideas for content that provides value to your viewers.

Targeting Your Audience:

It’s one thing to start a social media page, start adding content and hope that something sticks. However, you can greatly increase your chances of success by studying your audience and figuring out what drives them to engage with content. One way of doing this is by running split A/B tests with your posts and seeing what content does the best. After studying the analytics behind each post, you can come up with variations on new content based on your findings.

Make Powerful Connections with Your Network:

Most vloggers understand the inherent value of influencer marketing but not everyone knows how to effectively pull it off. As a vlogger, you’ll want to figure out who the other content creators are in your same niche and link up with them to grow your follower count. But before you go about requesting their assistance, make sure you have something to offer them. Though you may not have the clout yet, Moz has many ideas for how you can link up with influencers and build greater awareness amongst individuals you are targeting in your niche. 

Figure Out The Nuts and Bolts of Each Platform

In order to truly make a social media outreach plan worth your while, you’ll need to understand the core nuts and bolts of each platform. This will allow you to evolve your content in conjunction with each platform as new features are released and old ones are made defunct. In the following sections, we’ll go over the core features like core user demographic, user behavior, and content data analysis you’ll need to pay attention to on the major platforms.

Facebook

Core User Demographic

While it was once a haven for college-aged individuals, Facebook has now become the go-to social media solution for the general public. And by the general public, I mean the entire world. With 2.23 billion users on the site, it should be a necessity for any vlogger to use it for promotional purposes. That being said, however, it is still useful to look at exactly whom you will be showcasing your content to. According to Sprout Social, 88% of 18-29-year-olds use the network. Even more surprising, however, is that 62% of people aged 65 and up use the service, meaning that it is the network with the widest age range that could support content promotion for the widest variety of vlog niches.

Updating Facebook Page

User Behaviour

Besides figuring out who your core demographic on the service is, you’ll want to figure out by what method your demographic prefers to take in content. If you are looking to attract older cohorts, you’ll want to primarily create content that is easier to consume on desktops. Easy to read articles and photographs are perfect for this method of delivery. On the other hand, younger cohorts tend to lean towards mobile phone usage and will likely have the app downloaded. Try using the unique scroll based advertisements on these users. Video content cuts across all demographics and will greatly help you in attracting users of all kinds to your page.

Content Data Analysis

Since there are so many businesses on Facebook these days, the best place to start with your content data analysis is to observe what your competitors are doing. You can benchmark your efforts against the number of their followers, how often they post and what their engagement looks like.

Additionally, the Facebook Audience Insights tool is an incredibly sophisticated system that shows you a variety of key metrics that will be important as you test which content actually works in converting visitors to followers and eventually leads them back to your original vlog. You can use page, post, and video metrics to get a better understanding of how well your content is doing. Check out a few KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) the insights tool provides you with:

  • Page Metrics: Page Likes and Audience Growth, Engaged Users
  • Post Metrics: Post Reach, Post Engagement, Comments, Likes, Shares
  • Video Metrics: Video Engagement, Time Engaged, Total Plays

While it is easy to get lost in the sauce over metrics, head on over to this page from Yoast, to demystify all the numbers. At the end of the day, your most important growth factors will be page likes and audience engagement so if you find yourself doing well in both of those areas you shouldn’t have much cause for worry. YouTube videos are some of the most shared content on Facebook, and one of the best ways to create viral content is with a high quality camera for Youtube videos to create captivating footage that is sharable.

Instagram

Core User Demographic

As of this month, Instagram currently boasts approximately one billion users. According to a recent article on Hootsuite, millennials are the demographic that reign on Instagram. When you break up the users under 35 years of age (about 70% of the app), it looks a little something like this:

  • Ages 13–17: 57 million (7%)
  • Ages 18–24: 270 million (32%)
  • Ages 25–34: 270 million (32%)

This is an incredibly mobile demographic, so it would help to understand how mobile psychology works when looking to promote your vlog on the channel.

User Behaviour

When looking at mobile phone user behavior in general, peak activity occurs in the morning as well as the evening. This makes sense as daytime hours are typically spent either in the classroom or at work when users are more likely to be using a desktop as opposed to a mobile device. Looking at Instagram specifically, UI plays a big factor in how users engage with the mobile app. Over time, the app format of the app has changed so it is important to take note of how these changes might affect how you run your page.

One note of caution. Though it might seem easy to just turn your account into just another vlog, you’ll want to study exactly what kind of content performs well. Many users typically skip through longer videos or scroll past lengthy text-based posts. Make sure your posts pop and use appropriate hashtags in the descriptions to target your audience.

Content Data Analysis

Once you have converted your vlog Instagram account into a business profile, you’ll be able to discover Instagram insights. The activity tab will allow you to track weekly interactions, reach and impressions on your posts. Additionally, metrics on the new “Stories” feature are also available up to 14 days after you create the story.

Instagram app on smart phone

If you want more details on exactly what metrics to dive more into on your Instagram posts, check out this post from The Social Media Examiner.

Twitter

Core User Demographic

As of 2018, there are currently 336 million monthly active users on Twitter with the bulk of U.S. adults in the 18-29 age range. This is interesting as the declines as you move up in the age group. The service is not popular at all with teens in the U.S.-only 3% of whom say they use it the most out of all the platforms.

Cell phone with twitter

With these insights, you can determine whether or not you’d like to heavily pursue a Twitter campaign to generate vlog followers. If you vlog about topics of interest to young adults like sports or entry-level job experiences, you might have more success with a Twitter campaign. On the other hand, a vlog that is focused on makeup tutorials for pre-teens might not fare as well on the platform.

User Behaviour

Since Twitter is a fantastic source for many to stay updated on what’s going in the world, make sure to publish content that will add value to your core users. Like we noted before, this will work great if you are a vlogger focused on sports news. Twitter gives you a place to inform your followers on live updates while giving your own unique spin on the news story.

Content Data Analysis

Once you’ve created a Twitter business profile, you’ll be able to start tracking the movement on your account.

The analytics tool is quite intuitive and similar to the Facebook Insights tool when it comes to tracking data week over week or month over month. Unlike Facebook, however, the Twitter analytics tool makes it very easy to promote your tweets while you track how well your content. This makes the testing and result implementation cycle that much easier to pull off.

Let’s Talk Paid Campaigns and Advertising Your Vlog on Social

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to put a single cent behind social if you can pull it off perfectly. That being said, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to give up your afternoon latte for a quick boost to your business advertising goals. If you do it wisely, you can make incredible returns for very small sums of money.

Your paid advertising results are often times predicted by the platform you use as well as the amount you end up spending. Since we can’t all be like Tai Lopez and toss hundreds of thousands of dollars at paid YouTube video views, it is important to be smart about how paid campaigns are carried out.

App icons on cell phone

By using a combination of paid content on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, you can generate similar results by reaching out to your target audience across all touch points instead of just burying them on one platform.

On the other hand, you might want to focus your efforts solely on one platform as that is the one the majority of your audience is likely to use. As we noted above, if your channel is highly targeted towards millennials, it won’t be a bad bet to focus your ad spend on Instagram content that allows users from the app to funnel back to your vlog.

With a bit of patience and strategy, you can win the paid advertising campaign without dipping so far into your pockets that you begin operating at a loss.

After you have taken account of these three major functions of promoting your vlog on social media, try maintaining a bit of consistency and remember to engage with your fans. Rome wasn’t built in a day so it would be a hard ask to think that only one promotion or post will skyrocket you to the top. Additionally, by constantly engaging with your fans, you are likely to create loyal followers that will vouch for your content and spread your influence by word of mouth.

It has never been easier to promote your vlog on social network channels. By taking the time to understand the nuts and bolts of each platform and evolve with them, you will soon find your content improving and generating greater traction at the same time.

Boss Industrial that many people have never heard up. But they are well known within the log splitter industry because of their dedication to quality. Boss has chosen a business model that we are big fans of; Do one thing and do it well. Our years of experience in this industry have reaffirmed our awareness of a well-known dilemma: quality vs quantity. Some brands choose to make money by making a wide variety of products, knowing that they will not be the best manufacturer of any single one of them. But, the gross combined sales from all of them combined will be enough to remain profitable. This is the quantity approach. The opposite side of this dilemma is the quality approach, where a brand focuses all resources and efforts into becoming the market leader for a specific product. These companies believe that they can be profitable by making a product that is better than their competition. Consumers will recognize the higher quality and demand the superior craftsmanship.