You What? YouTube Optimisation Explained

11th February 2016

You don’t have to be 007 to play the spy. Online monitoring of competition is a key part of any successful brand. Without it, you’re destined for failure. Luckily, there’s no hiding in the bushes when it comes to keeping an eye on social media accounts. Here are our top tips for learning from your competitors online.

Keywords

First things first – find all the brands you classify as competitors. While you probably have an idea of who your main competitors are, pushing the boat out and finding accounts similar to your own is super helpful. For instance, you might be a clothing brand, but seeing how make-up brands act on Instagram can give you greater insight into another type of content.

Once you’ve found all your competitors or similar brands, follow every brand on a single account. This way you’ll have a constant feed filled purely with competitors.

Encourage engagement wherever possible

Engagement is the bread and butter of online optimisation and YouTube relies on it more than most. Building up and keeping your viewers requires interactions, comments, likes and subscribers. Not only does this shoot you up the rankings in search engines, but it also encourages a sense of community within your content space. Keep signposting your videos with hints to like and subscribe without going over the top, while coaxing conversation out of people in the comments section.

Interact with other creators

While engaging with your own viewers may be fundamental, outreaching across to channels and collaborating with other creators can seriously help optimise your profile. Two communities coming together is mutually beneficial for the both of you. The added exposure generated, like it has with many other channels, can boost your account to the next level.

Use SocialBlade to check your and your competitors Analytics

SocialBlade is a fantastic site when it comes to deciphering the best way forward for your content. Checking and comparing recent videos with past ones can help you decipher what works and what doesn’t. Don’t be scared to have a peek over at your competitors too, SocialBlade has a complete catalogue of every creator’s progress so you can use analytics to optimise your content.

Viewer Retention

Gaining viewers and subscribers is the easy bit; keeping them is a whole other game. YouTube’s infamous algorithm favours videos with higher retention rates, so the longer viewers watch your videos, the higher you’ll appear in search results. In a recent revamp, YouTube has begun categorising portions of videos when creators leave timestamps in the description. This can be an effective way (especially for long videos) to direct viewers to the parts of the video they came to see and, therefore, stopping them from leaving too early.

YouTube is a constantly evolving landscape and the larger it inevitably gets, the tougher it is to stand out from the crowd. Honing your general practices is more important than ever. So stick by your key principles, do the groundwork and enjoy the benefits that come with optimisation.

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