How to Build Your Audience on Social Platforms from YouTube and Beyond

By Chris Smith on May 17, 2017

As the world’s third most visited site and second largest search engine, YouTube is an unmissable platform for brands making use of video marketing - it is home to billions of hours of video and millions of monthly viewers.  That being said, savvy, successful marketers should be keen to developing their audience beyond YouTube. For example, take Zype customers Kin Community and What’s Trending.

Individuals are able to take full control of their own marketing, similar to how YouTube star Philip DeFranco launched his own crowdfunded news network.

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While magnifying your outreach through multiple platforms can substantially improve your return on investment, diversifying your audience-building approach has a defensive component to it as well. Creators often find themselves in a game of musical chairs between a variety of algorithms, and embrace the risk that a major change may have a dramatic impact on their monetization. This is one of the main reasons why a retention-based growth strategy is incredibly important for video marketers looking to keep their audience regardless of circumstances out of their control.

Using Social Media to Magnify and Retain Your Audience

It is incredibly important to approach video marketing with the same sort of omnipresent tenacity of any cross-channel digital marketing campaign. You should identify every social media platform through which you can sustain interaction with your audience and engage on all fronts.

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The most successful influencers no longer use YouTube as their only core audience engagement platform. You can find them all over Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram posting native content to those platforms, but also sharing their new YouTube based videos to drive traffic to their home channel as well.

Your brand shouldn’t be integrating your YouTube audience with every one of your social media outlets, instead, to capitalize on your time and resources, focus on 1-3 platforms that you and your team can focus on to maintain your brand image and post high quality content.

Be smart - schedule your YouTube videos within your regular posting schedule throughout all of your social media channels. This keeps your audience coming back to your YouTube videos to maintain it as your core platform, and allows your YouTube hosted videos to see a substantial uptick in views while avoiding any sudden change in the YouTube ranking algorithm or content policies that would bury your videos or de-monetize your content.

Use Each Social Media Platform for Specific Types of Engagement

Using a variety of social media platforms to entertain your core audience is a great strategy because it creates the ability to provide different types of value on each platform while still bringing your audience back to your YouTube videos.

For example, many YouTube influencers use Twitter because it’s an easy way to @ reply a viewer, create minute by minute useful content, and interact with your audience in order to get feedback or establish deeper relationships.

Instagram allows marketers to create visually appealing content or short videos that aren't as extensive as creating and editing a full video on YouTube.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a great platform that can be used to create a secondary audience retention center outside of YouTube because its robust analytics and advertising tools can not only keep your current audience engaged with your brand, but also help grow it in a way that is specific to the type of audience you have built on YouTube.

While all of these social media platforms allow creators to engage and build their audiences beyond YouTube, it is still important to continue to engage with viewers within the platform itself. This shows viewers that you are a real human being using YouTube as a place of interaction between people.

Outreach to Influential Blogs and Websites

Video plays an important role in the current digital landscape. When constantly dealing with video-heavy platforms such as YouTube, it’s easy to forget that there are websites and blogs out there that are not making full use of video.

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This presents the opportunity to form mutually beneficial relationships with website and blogs. As a video creator, you could potentially have your work featured in front of a large audience that is otherwise unfamiliar with your brand. This can translate into more views on your home YouTube channel. The websites and blogs would receive a new form of high quality content that creates value for their audience and diversifies their current content.

Video outreach is not a process that happens overnight. A successful video marketing outreach strategy is the culmination of countless relationship building interactions with website owners and blogs, and it requires a significant amount of foresight and planning. The first step is to create a list of sites, blogs, niche communities, and online influencers that you would want to share your videos with. Then, pitch the right videos or ideas to them, and let them know that you exclusively want to work with them. Topical and trending content that is tailored to a specific blog or audience tends to be much more valuable to these sites.

Final Thoughts

These strategies will help any marketer or video creator to grow their audience beyond YouTube. Of course, it is important to create a strategy for keeping your entire audience connected within the same goal of watching your video content. A diversified audience building approach can work wonders for your brand; however, if it is not carefully monitored you could end up with an audience with extremely broad interests that won’t respond as actively to your content. Build a YouTube video content journey that nourishes your audience’s growth while still maintaining the high quality that audience has gotten used to.

If you are using a handful of different social media platforms, websites, and blogs to build your audience, you want to create a place that you will always have access to them, and more importantly keep them engaged with your videos wherever they may be. Building beyond YouTube is important to developing an audience that could be mobilized to watch your content on any platform.

Connect your video with viewers, everywhere.