Priming your brand’s YouTube channel for success
Q: What do the graphs below represent?
A: A channel primed to grow exponentially upon releasing a viral video.
Many YouTube channels—creators and brands alike—struggle to reap the benefits of a “viral” video. The individual video performs extremely well, but the channel fails to take advantage of that breakout hit to grow its subscriber base, and viewers never watch another video on the channel.
After the release of MisterEpicMann‘s infamous ‘How Animals Eat Their Food’, on April 8, 2013, the channel’s total views increased from 3.4M to 123M in the span of 30 days (from April 7, 2013 to May 7, 2013)—and subscribers increased from 34K to 1.88M over the same period.
If your brand thinks it has the next ‘How Animals Eat Their Food’ on its hands (but hopefully only in the context of a sustainable programming strategy), there are steps you should take to ensure that the success of that video has a lasting impact on your entire channel.
This series will profile brands that have experienced viral success on YouTube and highlight best practices that those brands could have implemented to prime their channels for exponential growth. First up:
HONEY MAID
Honey Maid has a total of 22 public videos on its channel. Two of the channel’s recent uploads include ‘Honey Maid: This is Wholesome :30 TV Commercial | Official’ (7M views, 10K likes, 2.9K comments) and ‘Honey Maid: Love’ (3.9M views, 45K likes, 7K comments).
Honey Maid turned the trolling generated by its first video into another video with a strong positive message, and people took notice. Yet despite the success of these two videos numbers-wise, the Honey Maid channel still has only 5K subscribers and 14M total views as of June 2014.
Our recommended strategies to optimize this channel include:
- More content: Honey Maid should build out its library more fully to incent viewers to remain on its channel once they land there. It should create videos specifically with Honey Maid’s target demo in mind and release them consistently based on a preset schedule.
- Fully optimized metadata: All video description boxes should include social links, a website link, and subscription link. Video-specific descriptions should be SEO-friendly, featuring specific keywords with high search volume at the beginning of the description. Implementing a set of standardized tags will also help associate Honey Maid’s content together and help the channel dominate the right-hand rail on YouTube’s pages.
- Consistent branding: Titles should include Honey Maid branding so viewers immediately recognize Honey Maid content wherever it appears on YouTube.
- Community management: Honey Maid can increase its engagement score (ratio of total views to total engagements) by responding to comments and including engagement annotations that ask questions and encourage dialogue.
Kudos to Honey Maid and many other brands (more profiles to come!) for creating content that works so well on YouTube. It’s hard to predict when a video will rocket into the stratosphere—but your brand should ensure that it’s prepared for when it does.
If you’re a brand looking to learn more about how our creative, our insights, and our client service get you front and center with the connected generation of teens and millennials, authentically and at scale, please contact Fullscreen’s Channel+ team to optimize your branded content today.
Note: All numbers sourced from publicly available data on Social Blade and channel pages. Read more here
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