In 30 seconds:
- How do you boost your YouTube engagement rate? We’re sharing the insider tips you need to amplify your ER.
- How do you work out your engagement rate? We’ve got the only formula you need.
- Several factors can affect your Youtube engagement rate. Keep these in mind when developing your strategy.
Your YouTube engagement rate matters. Why? Great engagement on YouTube means increased growth, better reach and maximum ROI on campaigns. Over 2.5 billion people access YouTube once a month. There’s a massive pool of potential customers just waiting to engage with your content, and it’s your job to deliver.
Hoping for the right results just won’t cut it. Brands need to test and analyse their data (especially engagement rate) to determine what kind of content works and what doesn’t. You also can’t create a one-for-all plan. How you approach your Instagram engagement may be completely different from your YouTube engagement. You must create a long-term engagement strategy to win specifically on this channel.
So, how do you do that? We’re taking you through the best insider tips to help you boost your ER and get results. To start? We’re examining the fundamentals.
What is YouTube engagement rate?
Your YouTube engagement rate is the percentage of users interacting with your account. Effectively it measures how much people are connecting with your brand. A good engagement rate means that your followers enjoy your content and can be even more powerful than the number of views your videos get.
You can use this metric to determine actions within your social media strategy and ascertain the content you should create. When you have a higher ER, you’re more likely to grow your number of followers (follower count), access the right kinds of customers and gain high-quality interactions with your brand. It’s a powerful tool.
Where can I find my YouTube engagement rate?
If you want to find out your ER, this is the engagement rate formula:
(Total number of engagements / total impressions) x 100
To ensure accurate data; you’ll need to decide on a time range and check your channel analytics. What is a good YouTube engagement rate? That’s a tricky one.
First, it’s unhelpful to compare your ER to other social media platforms. The average Instagram engagement rate (0.65%) is very different to the average YouTube engagement rate (between 0.28% to 1%).
Within YouTube itself, there are so many variations too, with different niches holding variable engagement rates. Some have far higher, like Gaming content, with an average 5.47% ER. This makes sense since the gaming community is increasingly interactive.
The number of subscribers on your channel (subscriber count) can also matter, with smaller YouTube accounts generally getting much higher engagement rates than larger ones. It’s not necessarily a competing match here; your ER is there to help you track your own progress and understand how your audience interacts.
What affects your ER?
- Likes and dislikes. Users can make these thumbs-up or thumbs-down reactions on a video. Analysing the number of likes and dislikes will help you understand which content works better than others. When they work in your favour, they help your video move up in the YouTube search results.
- Comments. Your comment section is key to a better engagement rate. If you have an active comments section, not only will it help your ER, but it will also help you create a bustling community (which should boost UGC).
- Shares seriously impact engagement as they magnify your reach of a video. If you can encourage your viewers to share, you’ll see even further growth.
The more you use these three elements to your advantage, the more you’ll see your ER grow and hit your benchmarks. So how can you adapt your video content on YouTube to do precisely this? We have some juicy insider tips for you to take away and inject into your YouTube engagement strategy.
5 insider tips to improve your YouTube engagement rate
1. Understand your audience and leverage their interests
To get the best engagement, you need to know what your target audience is looking for. The YouTube Algorithm selects videos that are “right” for their viewer and enticing enough for them to keep watching. Understanding their interests can help you create the content users want to engage with. How do you do that? Using YouTube Analytics, you can gain insights into who’s watching your videos, their demographics, and their interests. You can test different kinds of content and adapt your campaigns and strategy accordingly.
The top reason people come to YouTube is to “watch videos that entertain me”. The second most popular reason people watch YouTube videos is “to learn”. So think about the kind of content that your audience could find entertaining or educational and focus on the best-performing topics. Ensure you use relevant SEO in your videos to get them in front of the right people. That means an attention-grabbing and easy-to-find title, plus an accurate description.
Of course, ensuring your brand is authentic is also key. You want people to come back for your content because they connect with it. 7 in 10 customers will buy more from brands they trust, and your YouTube channel is a place where you can build that trust through relevant content. Once you nail this, you’ll start seeing your engagement increase (because you’ll be reaching the right people who actually want to engage with you).
2. Stay on trend
If you want better engagement, you need to harness the power of trends. Trends can help you expand your reach since people will be searching for them. They’re also great for content idea generation. Go back to tip 1 and think about your audience and the kind of trends they may follow.
Challenges are a great way to get people engaging with your videos. You can jump on a YouTube challenge trend and put your own spin on it. VAT19, the e-commerce brand, is one of the most popular channels on YouTube. Their brilliant approach to challenges is one of the reasons why.
Since they sell “curiously awesome” gifts, candy, toys, gummies, putty, puzzles, games, and more, jumping on fun challenges to show off these products skyrocketed their growth. They’ve jumped on trends like the “try not to laugh” trend and subjected their creative team to “real or not” eating challenges.
They’ve even put their own products to the test in a “break it to make it” challenge where people try to break a particular toy with another object for the chance to win $1000 (note that pricing the competition puts higher stakes on it). This one received over 9 million video views and over 2k comments showing just how powerful content like this can be for your engagement.
Note that they use relevant, clear thumbnails to show their challenges and make it entertaining throughout. They’ve also nailed their audience’s desires, showing them exactly what they’d like to see, resulting in over 8.57 million subscriptions.
3. Interact and encourage UGC
What makes an engaging account? One that engages back. Utilise the comments section to reply to your viewers to help drive conversation and encourage more engagement. Use comments to better understand your audience and promote the material they seek.
Go a step further and actively get them involved. Brand engagement rises by 28% when you expose consumers to both professional content and user-generated videos. Why does it work so well? UGC is seen as truthful and authentic, which customers (especially young people) crave.
So how can you boost UGC? Encourage content like unboxing videos, reviews, and challenges to engage your customers and further boost your reach. Urge your viewers to jump on trends and creatively engage in your brand. Giveaways and competitions can also help drum up further content. Just ensure you’re keeping things entertaining and incentivised.
GoPro (one of the top brands on YouTube) has got its customers pumped to share. Adding this content to their account has attracted more like-minded YouTube subscribers to engage.
4. Use YouTube Shorts
Since TikTok took over the social media world with short-form videos, other social networks have started to see their potential. Google brought out YouTube shorts in September 2020 (their answer to the new demand for snappy video formats). 39% of marketers report that short-form videos generate the biggest ROI, so utilising this format will be key to your success on the app. YouTube shorts also happen to drive the most traffic, so people are clearly engaging with this content.
It’s a common misconception that young people only want to see short-form content. Zoomers especially can sit through hours of social media content at a time, meaning they have the capacity to watch long-form videos, too. The key is sparking their interest with short-form content to grab their attention. Then you can double down and urge them to watch your longer videos.
So, create YouTube Shorts with an instant hook and a clear call to action to bring users into your community. Once you have them in the fold, they’ll watch extended content and help boost your ER long-term.
My Little Pony Official creates fun, snappy shorts to get their audience’s attention. They also feature episodes with a longer watch time on their page. They get fans interested with their shorts and encourage them to watch the longer episodes.
5. Partner with creators
61% of consumers trust influencer recommendations, compared to 38% who trust branded content. As we’ve discussed, that trust is the magic sauce to a high engagement rate. If you collaborate with a trusted creator, you’ll access a whole new audience pool, and their audience will be more likely to trust you too.
But don’t just pick any YouTube channel to work with. When it comes to YouTube influencer marketing, you need to work with content creators who align with your values. Think about your niche and who would fit into it, and don’t be afraid to think outside the box.
Of course, to get the best results for your engagement rate, you’ll need to partner with accounts with an engaged and active community. Micro-influencers and Nano-influencers have a higher engagement rate than mega-influencers and macro-influencers. They are, therefore, in a better position to deliver results.
How can you measure an influencer’s engagement rate? You can, of course, do the formula based on the interactions that we mentioned earlier. But this data is difficult to extrapolate.
We decided to make things simple for our clients. Bytesights, our in-house social listening and data insights tool, picks up an influencer engagement rate and helps us choose the ideal creator for any collab. It also happens to be our campaign manager, meaning we get real-time, instant feedback on strategies. Read more about Bytesights here.
This is a long-term engagement
Dependable engagement strategies won’t necessarily work overnight. You have to be in it for the long run, adapting your strategy and working on your techniques to get the best results. Utilising all the tools in your box, including other platforms, will help you maximise your results on YouTube. Cross-promote your content on channels like LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok to build traffic. Then you need to implement our insider tips to get this traffic active on your account. Consistency is key, so continually show up for your audience, and they’ll continually show up for you.
If you want to create the right engagement strategy for your brand, we can help. Get in touch to find out how we can get your ER sky-high.
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