How to Grow Your Audience on YouTube in 2024
YouTube is more crowded than ever. With millions of content creators competing for viewers' attention, it can be challenging to stand out and get noticed. However, it's essential to remember that at the end of the day, it's all about people.
Understanding Your Viewer Avatar 🎯\
The better you understand who you're making content for and being passionate about bringing them value, the more likely you are to succeed. To do this, you need to identify your potential viewer or what I like to call the viewer avatar. Once you have a clear picture of who your ideal viewer is, you can then do recon and research to see what type of content is engaging with that type of viewer avatar.
After identifying your viewer avatar, you can then come up with your content strategy. Your content strategy might be a multi-format strategy, or it might just be long-form, short-form, or a mix of all, especially if you're just starting. The key is to create value for that potential viewer, so YouTube serves them more suggested views, gets them on the homepage or even on trending.
The Importance of Average View Duration 🕒
One of the analytics that most content creators overlook is the average view duration. I look at that data point like a hop. If you can get people coming in and really binge-watching, really going through the process of finding so much value that they've watched three or four or five videos within a given 28 days or seven days or whatever it may be, then you know you've found something that can be replicated.
YouTube looks at the data and sees if the viewer is predicting what they want to watch and keeping them on the platform longer. If they're keeping on the platform longer and you're the creator that's doing that, it's like they're watching and binge-watching. YouTube's going to see, "Oh, here's a pattern of behavior. There's other people, pattern of behaviors like this. Let's serve your content out to more people," and that's actually how you grow really, really fast on YouTube.
Short-Form Video and Cross-Platform Distribution 📲
When it comes to short-form video and cross-platform distribution, there are two approaches. The first is to identify who's watching it and where's the value proposition. Repurposing content across all platforms can work well in some niches, like podcast interviews. However, it's essential to consider who your audience is and where they consume content.
For example, if you have a younger audience that engages with entertainment type content, it might not work as well to repurpose content across all platforms. Instead, it's better to create platform-specific content that resonates with your audience.
It's important to remember that your audience is cultivated per platform and they are different. For instance, MrBeast once told me that he has a different demographic on Facebook than on YouTube. Therefore, it's crucial to keep your audience in mind when deciding whether to leverage cross-platform distribution or be hyper-focused on a particular platform.
In conclusion, growing your audience on YouTube in 2024 requires a deep understanding of your viewer avatar, creating valuable content consistently, and being mindful of your audience's behavior on each platform. By following these best practices, you can stand out and get noticed on YouTube, even in a crowded space.