Growing your YouTube Channel to 100K subscribers
When I had Channel 8’s YouTube account handed over to me as part of my new role I had to admit it was daunting.
We had to break out of the ordinary — which is only experiencing channel growth during our annual tentpole event, Star Awards.
In these times, we need to understand that the market is saturated and the audience is plagued with choice paralysis. We can’t rely on being “the brand” or “the national broadcaster in Singapore” in order to attract and gain new audiences.
To be honest, it wasn’t a completely an impossible task as Channel 8 itself is a household brand with quite a large viewership in Singapore and some parts of Indonesia and Malaysia (and even beyond). There is a steady flow of quality TV series that have gathered a significant amount of following such as the CLIF series. The actors and actresses are prominent Singaporean celebrities and have become extremely familiar faces for many fans. And recently we got our Silver Play Button for crossing the 100K subscribers mark! Here’s a few learnings that I’d like to share with you on how to grow your YouTube channel!
Think bigger.
First, we had to take a step back to think beyond the bigger picture and shift our perspective. For a good amount of years there seemed to be a crippling fear that making our content easily available on various platforms online and offline will cannibalise viewership, as I expressed previously on my piece “Broadcast Media and its Fear of Digital”. However, collectively we all agreed that Mediacorp’s priority now is to ensure that anyone and everyone can consume our content regardless of their platform of choice — whether that be on Toggle, YouTube, television, IGTV, Facebook Watch or wherever they might be. This goes the same to us as we finally understand that each platform serves different kinds of demographics and/or target audiences.
We decided to take ownership of YouTube because we keep seeing that our dramas are vastly pirated on YouTube, with some of the unauthorised upload garnering up to half a million views. That’s when we knew that even if we keep submitting copyright takedowns, new pirated episodes is going to continue to sprout all over YouTube.
It takes a village, but after discussions and brainstormings, pulling strings and moving mountains, we have decided to make full episodes of our current and archive shows on YouTube. Toggle and FTA is still our priority, hence the episodes on YouTube will only be published about a week or more after the original airing date. But this way collectively Mediacorp has decided that they will be platform agnostic and reach our audiences everywhere.
Always look at your data
For however long your channel has been running, take some time to look into the data that you have through your YouTube Analytics and identify a few things:
- Which type of videos gets the most watch time?
- Where is your audience discovering your content?
- What are their devices of choice to watch content?
Through assessing previous videos’ data we noticed that shorter content such as trailers doesn’t get a lot of views and doesn’t contribute to a lot of watch time. The amount of watch time on your channel helps YouTube rank your channel higher. The algorithm rewards channels that keeps their audience engaged and continue to watch your videos.
You need to also understand how the audience who are not subscribed to your channel discovers your content. Do they come in through a search? A recommendation? Or simply through their discover page? That way you know if you’re mostly getting your views from searches then you’ve tagged your videos well. If they land on your videos through browse features then you have quite an appealing thumbnail and/or naming convention for your title. Based on stats such as these you are more equipped to enhance your videos to reach more audience.
Build a content schedule
What YouTube values the most is consistency. If you have a thousand videos ready to upload this month, sure. If you only have the resources to create one content a week, then make sure you have a steady stream of uploads each week.
For Channel 8, we segment the upload schedule into three categories:
- Primetime TV Dramas — new releases that air on the Ch8 9PM belt
- Archive TV Dramas — older shows released years ago
- Tentpole Events — the annual recurring or one-time events such as SPOP, Star Awards, StarSearch, etc.
Unlike some series on Netflix, we steadily stagger the uploads on Channel 8 slowly instead of publishing it in bulk. The reason why the uploads are staggered on Channel 8 is for retention and to form a habit out of our audiences. The channel did not have a steady schedule before and the content uploads are very sporadic — hence we never managed to build a channel recall on what type of content to expect for different days of the week.
Optimize your videos for YouTube
There are plenty of features available on YouTube to help optimize your videos on your channel. Make sure you are using them properly in order to improve your audiences’ consumption experience.
- Try to be as clear and/or catchy as possible on your title. Make sure your title is coherent and simple. Keep in mind that YouTube is the internet’s second biggest search engine, so try to put yourself in the public’s shoes and picture a few phrases they will type in to find your content.
- Thumbnails. Following the titling, of course you have to create an attractive thumbnail as well. Keep in mind that a lot of people watch YouTube through their smartphones (especially here in Asia), so you have to make sure that the thumbnails are clear enough when viewed through the YouTube mobile app.
- Playlists. Segment your YouTube videos into specific playlists to help the algorithm serve the audience similar videos.
- End tags & cards. Direct your audience on where to go next to herd them to watch more of your content instead of going astray to your competitor’s channels. Make sure your end tags are pointing your audience to the next episode or even to the next show.
- Subtitles! Because we are now so used to watching videos on our phones, silent — we need to make sure that our videos are subtitled accordingly. Another reason is to serve more audiences. Channel 8’s TV shows are all in Chinese, but we always try to make sure that our non-Chinese speaking audiences can consume the content as well through providing English subitles.
- Customize your channel — make it easy for your audience to click on a content they want by making sure that your wide array content is presentable on your channel. Keep it simple.
- Community Posts — Beyond the comments on each videos, give your viewers an avenue to discuss your content. Provide them with polls, updates, and more casual content on the Community tab.
To top off everything I’ve listed above, there are still so many ways you can do to help enhance your YouTube Channel. However, what I would recommend is to get officially certified by YouTube’s Creator Academy first — as a lot of the knowledge I’ve shared above are taught there.
Of course there’s no blanket solution for all and I’m just doing this for a little over six months now. The learning curve is still exponentially growing and I am very thankful for the opportunity for getting this project. Like I said earlier, Channel 8 is a household brand in itself and that certainly contributed to the viewership and the subscribers of the content we’ve gotten so far. Hopefully some of the items I shared earlier can be of use to you!
