If you produce videos and upload them to YouTube, you’ve no doubt shared your content across social media, sat back and waited for the views to roll in. More often than not, however, you’re stuck wondering why your video hasn’t earned the number of views you think it deserves. Well, here are five reasons you might be lacking in the views department and tips on how you can fix it!
1. You’re not using the right video tags
ReelSEO wrote an incredibly informative article last week that explains how to optimize YouTube Tags and Descriptions; we’ve pulled a couple helpful quotes from the post:
- “It’s best to have your specific keyword tags first because YouTube placed more weight on the first tags.”
- “Set up default tags so that you can be consistent from video-to-video. To do this go to My Channel –> Video Manager –> Channel –> Upload defaults (or go directly to https://www.youtube.com/upload_defaults.)”
When it comes to tagging, Derral Eves a YouTube and video marketing consultant breaks it up into four categories. Specific tags are one-word keywords that represent the subject of your video—pretty straightforward. Compound tags are multiple-word tags, but leave out words like “of,” “in,” “and,” etc. because YouTube ignores these words.
Also include generic tags like how-to, tutorial or vlog if applicable. Derral also mentions misspelling words on purpose because people search for these words. Check out his video on tagging here for more information.
2. You’re not delivering your content to the right audience
You may be under the impression that sharing your video across a few social media sites will earn you a ton of views. This is not the case. Once your friends have watched your video, it will get buried in their Twitter and Facebook feeds never to be seen again. If you’re lucky, your friends might give your video a few hundred views.
But what if you want more than that? What if you want to build a solid fan base for your video content? You have to deliver your online videos to the right audience. Let’s say you’re a video gamer and have a YouTube channel dedicated to gaming videos. Your goal should be to deliver your videos to an audience of gaming enthusiasts as these people will give you the most meaningful views and social engagement.
Doing this on your own, however, isn’t an easy task. How do you get your video onto sites that gamers frequent? Well, that’s where we come in. You can use the ViralGains platform to serve your videos to relevant, highly targeted individuals (in this case video gamers) who are going to love and share your content with friends. This will boost your presence amongst the gaming community and help you to develop a dedicated following.
3. You’re not optimizing videos for social sharing
Plain and simple—in order for your videos to go viral, people have to share them. So why not make it easier for viewers to share your content across their social networks? If you promote your videos through ViralGains, this is what the player will look like:
You can customize the social sharing buttons that appear at the top of your video to encourage maximum engagement with your content. You can also create a call-to-action to include below the player, along with a subscribe button. These elements work together to ensure that sharing, subscribing and clicking-through are as simple as possible for viewers.
4. You’re not utilizing the best promotional format
If you’ve already promoted your videos through another service like YouTube TrewView, you should understand the kind of placements you’re using. TrueView utilizes in-stream, in-slate, in-search and in-display formats. In-stream ads or pre-rolls are typically intrusive and interrupt a viewer’s experience.
In-slate ads aren’t much better. A viewer must choose an ad to watch before they can get to their desired content. In-search and in-display ads appear on the sidebar of related videos or when someone searches for specific content. Ultimately, these formats do not encourage interaction or social sharing, and can cause negative associations with your content.
This is why you need to invest in opt-in video advertisements. These kinds of ads aren’t force fed to viewers—people actually have to initiate a video play. When presented with opt-in video ads, viewers are more likely to watch the entire video as well as engage with the content via social shares and conversations.
This is why ViralGains only serves opt-in ads. If you choose to advertise through our platform, every video ad placement will be opt-in meaning you’ll receive the most value in terms of viewership and interactions.
5. You’re not spreading your content across different types of placements
We touched on this point briefly in #2. You can’t rely solely on your social networks to generate significant viewership. You have to reach the right audience through blogs, social games, influencers, mobile apps, etc. Again, this is often difficult to pull off on your own.
However, if you use the ViralGains platform, we’ll take your video content and serve it to your highly targeted audience through placements like the ones listed above. This maximizes your overall reach and will allow you to engage relevant viewers who may have never found your videos otherwise. Ultimately, limiting your video placements will limit your view count.
If you’re guilty of any of these, fear not! There are ways to fix each and every one of these issues. Every video you create has the potential to resonate with an audience; you just have to make sure this audience is finding your content. If you want to start delivering your videos to the right audience, in the right format across the right placements to generate valuable views and engagement, check out the ViralGains self-serve platform by clicking on the image below!