How To Improve Your YouTube Engagement

YouTube engagement is an essential factor representing insightful, shareable, and informative video content. 

This article will provide everything you know about this data, including the 4 practical tips on how to increase YouTube engagement. It will help you draw more extensive attention and new viewership, maintain many return audiences, and produce leads simultaneously.

What Is Engagement On YouTube? 

An engagement happens when a social media user takes action toward your content. In general, social networks have many types of interactions such as share, retweet, like, reaction, comment, follow, subscribe, etc. 

Mainly, YouTube engagement includes the following actions:

Like and Dislike

These 2 actions create an overall picture of your viewers’ opinion of whether they agree/like or disagree/dislike your video content. 

By letting you know the number of people who enjoyed your content, they can reveal which types of videos or topics suit and entertain your target audiences the most. 

Comment

This interaction, along with like/dislike, is the most common action users take on social platforms, including YouTube. It can be good or bad so prepare yourself before reading all of them. 

If likes and dislikes give you an overview of the audience’s thoughts, the comments will help you understand them more deeply. In other words, it helps explain the likes and dislikes via viewers’ detailed opinions and sentiment about your YouTube videos.

Share

Once your content hits the audience’s mind, they tend to share it with more people and organically encourage strange users to watch your videos. This action confirms a person is publicly expressing that he/she trusts and supports what you said in the video.

This data shows where, when, and how many YouTube users share videos. Shares from YouTube can happen on different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or messaging platforms (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, etc.).

Subscribers Change

If your content, personality, or value of your channel is engaging enough, strange YouTube viewers will become one of your subscribers. 

The change in your subscriber count is the best indicator to let you know your YouTube channel’s general quality. It can tell the number of new subscribers or followers that unsubscribed you in a given time. 

You can find these above metrics on the YouTube analytics page. As a creator, you should track them regularly to make the best out of your channel. These data are qualitative and valuable, helping you to improve your growth strategy.

You can also find many useful lessons about understanding engagement on YouTube Academy. Make sure to check them out!

Why Is YouTube Engagement Rate So Important? 

How To Calculate YouTube Engagement Rate?

It’s a number written in percentage showing how much engagement a video, blog post, etc. produces. It points out how much and how often the YouTube audience is interacting with your channel.

You can calculate the rate yourself or find an online engagement rate calculator and let it do the job to save time. The formula can be determined as below:

YouTube Engagement rate = (The number of likes + the number of comments + the number of shares)/the number of subscribers*100.

What Does It Mean To A YouTube Channel?

YouTube engagement rate is a crucial metric to look at when working in the content marketing industry, especially on this online video-sharing platform.

If you only need one number to check the audience’s overall responses to your channel, this rate is the one. Your engagement rate rises when you receive consistent and positive interactions. 

Influencers with higher engagement rates most likely cultivate markets that perceive their point of view. Besides, companies and brands will decide whether you have enough talent and connections to promote their products and services based on high engagement metrics. 

For example, a video with a low engagement rate is not interesting enough to motivate viewers to leave a like or comment after watching. 

On the contrary, videos with high engagement rates (possibly comes with a high reach count and good engagement ratio) prove that your content has the potential of becoming viral. 

How To Get More Engagement On YouTube? 

Eye-catching Custom Thumbnails

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, only after the giant Google. After typing the queries on the search bar, the audiences will choose among thousands of results. 

The Youtube thumbnails are the main factor to decide whether or not a viewer will look at your material. Together with the video titles, they’re the very first things that viewers notice before clicking on any video. 

An engaging thumbnail will drive everyone curious, hence increasing the click-through rate of that video. Randomly picking a fascinating screenshot from your video to use as a thumbnail is not enough. Professional YouTubers always custom their own images.

General notes when making thumbnails

Whatever user expectation this striking image sets must match the actual content of the video. Don’t turn it into a clickbait thumbnail that annoys your audiences. 

If it disappoints the viewers in the first 10 seconds of the video, it will cause a massive fall-off in audience optimization. 

You want to make the thumbnail and every detail readable and clear to see on all screen sizes and devices. A high image resolution of 1280×720 pixels is recommended for a satisfying experience when enjoying your video production.

Remember to zoom in and out when editing any element on the background photo. After finishing, you may want to export the thumbnail and try displaying it on as many smart devices as possible. 

Read more: How To Create Attractive Youtube Thumbnails?

Adding annotations or your branding

Every video needs a title, and every image needs a heading. The text shown on thumbnails is more or less the second title of the video. It must be short, significant, and bold. We suggest using big and beautiful fonts while making text to grab viewers’ attention quickly. 

Besides, the images must match the thumbnail’s overall idea, not just clickbait. It is a mistake that you can easily make, so choose wisely! 

For instance, a diet tutorial thumbnail should include a before & after photo. A laptop review thumbnail must feature that laptop’s image. 

Using a familiar face, or your face – the channel owner – is also an ideal engaging factor in personal branding. It allows users to quickly recognize your videos in a seer list of search results.  

What’s more, some small visual effects and animated graphics can make an impression and improve your videos’ traffic. 

As you can see from many famous YouTube accounts, the most favorite ones are sticker effects, large arrows, circles, etc. These trends and styles can vary for each target audience segment.

Keep Your Videos As Concise As Possible

Now that the users have clicked on your video, the next step is to keep them stuck around. An average internet user only spends about 20 seconds on a website, so you have to grab their attention in the first 5-10 seconds. 

That’s why we don’t recommend long-winded videos and roundabout intros. 

YouTube algorithm depends on video watch time to rank your videos. It consists of the video’s percentage that a viewer watched and the number of minutes watched. Of course, the former one is more important. 

To increase user retention, you should follow these suggestions:

• Get straight to the point. The video can have its intro and outro sections but keep them striking (particularly the intro) and short enough to show what the audience can expect in the next section.
• Videos that are longer than 10 minutes usually have low retention rates. Summarize all you want to say in the video into a brief speech, keeping only the main points and implementing them visually, succinctly. Try to remove the lengthy parts. 

However, it also depends on the content you want to convey. If you have many valuable and important things to convey, your video can be longer than 10 minutes, or you can split it into 2 or more videos to make a series. 

We noticed that some videos longer than 1 hour still gain millions of views. You might experience a short drop-off at first. After that, most viewers will stay, and there’s a high chance they won’t skip a second. 

This fact leads to the third suggestion below, scroll down for more details. 

Try To Produce Viral And Consistent Videos

This tip ensures a stable number of views and a dedicated subscriber base for your YouTube channel. It also ensures your name can easily stand out among tons of content creators and attracts more strangers and new followers.

Schedule videos on a regular basis

A credible and consistent source of information is an established way of growing and maintaining engagement. It will keep your audiences coming back for more content. Gradually, they will look forward to your weekly uploading time. 

But don’t let the quantity overwhelm the quality. Make sure every video posted is fresh, up-to-date, and has a considerable core value. There’s a bunch of competitors sharing the same fields and core audience with you. 

In other words, you have to maintain the number of loyal subscribers, don’t let them down. Otherwise, they will leave for more exciting content. 

Get inspired by trends 

Following a movement is a reliable method to provide your viewers with impressive videos and raise strangers’ awareness. How can a YouTube user enjoy and talk about your content if he/she hasn’t even heard about you?

Through improving your brand awareness, more people will find you, and the views will rise. As a result, they will respond to the content, and the engagement will increase. 

Don’t follow every trend you see online; choose one that meets the following criteria:

• The trend is most likely what your audiences want to watch.
• It must go well with the products/ services/ brands you want to promote.
• It suits the general theme/ concept/ idea throughout your channel.

Read more: YouTube Search Trends – Ways to Become Channel Trending Videos

Encourage Viewers To Interact With The Videos

Unfortunately, most YouTube users have the habit of watching in silence and not engaging with any content. But you’re a YouTuber; engagement is everything to your job.

Believe us or not, it’s everything social media marketing is about. So don’t hesitate to reach out to your viewers directly and tell them to interact with your video. 

Let them know that you respect their constructive opinions, and they can help you improve the content quality. 

Many creators say a personalized quote at the end of each video like “smash that subscribe button” or “feel free to like, share, and let me know what you think in the comment section below.” You have to speak up for what you want, or you might lose the chance. 

Some people also leverage YouTube videos to pursue their business or work on other platforms. They leave a call to action in each video, asking their viewers to follow them on various social networks, visit their websites/ affiliate links, read their blogs, and so on. 

All needed information and links will pop up on the screen at a specific position or be available in the video descriptions. These social skills to get data can increase viewership as well. 

Keep in mind that the above recommendations are all aimed at organic engagement. They are the methods to gain real likes, comments, shares, and subscribers. 

Don’t generate or buy fake engagement. You can still buy real interactions, but make sure the company you’re working with properly follows the Fake Engagement Policy.

Final Thought 

In a nutshell, YouTube engagement gauges how much users appreciate your content and the whole YouTube channel. Based on these metrics, you can predict which type of content your audiences like the most and follow our step guide to engage more viewers. You may want to often keep track of all the data using YouTube Analytics, calculate engagement rates to note down which video topics to focus on, or whether you need to change your posting consistency.