Let’s talk about a few ideas that you guys can use to drive viewers from your one video on YouTube to start watching other videos on your channel, thus increasing their viewing session on your channel, getting more views, more watch time, and boom, exploding your channel overall. That’s coming up.
FabulousNat wrote and asked this.
“Hi, Tim. My question is how can I drive audience interaction to my other videos when the majority of my views come via mobile devices, where annotations do not work?”
Interactive Cards
Great question. Let me give you a few different ideas. Number one is you can now use interactive cards. And they do work on mobile. And if you’re not familiar with what they are, I’ll pop one up right here. They’re usually in the upper right corner of the screen in the video. And they work across all devices.
And you can add up the five of them in your videos. You can link them to other videos. You can link them to playlists. You can link them to other channels. You can link them to your website. There’s a lot of different things you can do. Even a support card– have people support you in the content you’re making– a lot of different options there.
And so if you’re talking about a subject or topic or something in your videos that you actually go into more in depth about, or you have another video in your channel that’s related to something you’re talking about at a certain point in your video, then it would be a great idea to add an interactive card at that point in your video, and hopefully, drive people to that other video if they’re interested in going deeper into that topic.
Links In The Description
Number two is you can also put links in the description of your videos. And that works on mobile as well. You can just direct people. Say, hey, if you want to learn more about this, I put a link in the description below this video here on YouTube. Point down there.
Share in Playlist Mode
Number three, when you do share a video anywhere, whether it’s on Twitter or Facebook or in the description of your video or wherever you put it, make sure you share that video inside of playlist mode. And what that means is when you actually go to your playlist and then click on one of your videos, what that gives you, on the right hand side or underneath the video on YouTube, is a list of all the other videos in that playlist.
And so people are more likely to be able to keep watching other videos from that playlist that you’ve shared, as opposed to just sharing just the YouTube URL itself and them just drifting off after that video is finished.
Brand Your Thumbnails
The fourth way to get people watching more of your videos is one that not a lot of people think about or consider. And that is to brand your thumbnails so that they all have some similar trait in common so that when people are watching your video and they see the suggested videos up the right hand side of the page, when they see a lot of thumbnails, or even just a few thumbnails, that all look somewhat the same– like my thumbnails have the big red thing right on the left side. It’s kind of actually a little overbearing. I’m still working on figuring out a better way for that.
But people are more likely to click on those videos because they stand out from all the other videos that are there that are just kind of random. When people see that pattern in the related videos, they are more likely to click on one of those videos than they are to click on one of the other ones, even if your videos are close to the bottom.
Build Email List From Your Audience
And number five– and this is a bit further removed– but you could offer to give away something for free in exchange for someone’s email address. And then when you do that, then you have their e-mail address and you can continue to send them other videos. And now, it’s getting them to watch more videos of yours because you’re putting them right in their inbox now.
So the way I do that here at Video Creators is that my end card– I don’t even talk about it. I just show it visually. It’s that book called “The Secret to Building Your YouTube Audience,” which I give away completely for free. People go, they sign up for my email list, and I send them like a lot exclusive tips and ideas and information I don’t publish here that don’t quite fit in a video format.
But then I can also have the ability, if I want to, to put other videos of mine straight in their inbox for them to see it. And so that’s another way you can get people to watch more videos of yours as well.
I’d love to hear from you guys in the comments below with tips, ideas, tactics, strategies that worked well for you in increasing a viewer’s session watch time overall and you keep on getting them to watch one video after the next.
Now, there isn’t something in YouTube Analytics currently right now that really shows clearly what people’s path is from one video to the next. But from what I understand, what I have heard, that is coming. And so in the meantime, I would love to hear what you guys do. And then we’ll probably revisit this again when that analytic finally gets rolled out into our YouTube Analytics where can see the actual data and how this stuff is working.