Why video, and why now
YouTube has become one of the leading platforms where people spend their time. In 2024 its audience exceeds 2.5 billion active users. Even with the slowdown in Russia, this video platform still holds the leading place among Russians.
Look at the monthly audience according to Mediascope for 2024:
Not many companies try to start their own YouTube channel, simply because it is hard. Much harder than a blog in Telegram. But keep in mind that a video channel pays back proportionally better than a text blog, if only because video is far easier to spread, watch and remember.
Also, about 80% of people are “visual learners”: they take in information better through sight. That is why video is much more effective than text.
Video is content, so know who you make it for
Content on YouTube can be anything from full-length films to Shorts. Short videos are by now an established trend, so they deserve special attention.
YouTube has no topic limits: you can film movie reviews, event reports, master classes, educational material, videos with animals, interviews, recipes, neural network demos and much more.
The more unusual the channel idea, the less competition and the better the chance to win a profitable niche.
An example of an interesting idea for a business and self-development channel: every video is an animation, and the message is how a monkey becomes a human through situations everyone knows.
Before you start a video, picture your target audience. Remember that these must be the same people who buy your product or service.
For B2B companies, for example, these can be:
- entrepreneurs;
- marketers;
- merchants.
The best solution is to narrow the audience: it makes the content more targeted.
Besides expert videos, dilute them with something funny or even provocative. Dry expertise gets boring fast. Content can be built from the customer’s pain points, or from how your product closes them.
A good example of channel content is Skyeng.
The videos are humorous and suit a wide audience (though the emphasis is on youth content). One main idea runs through them: how the English language can be useful in everyday and, conversely, unusual circumstances. Expert content is there too.
People watch video for two reasons: they want to be entertained or to learn something new. So your content must meet at least one of those criteria.
Remember video quality as well: multi-camera shooting, high resolution, pace and emotion help hold the viewers’ attention. Educational material, tutorials and master classes are especially popular.
How to promote a video and which metrics to watch
The main goal is to bring the video to the top of YouTube search results, but it gets an extra advantage if you also rank high in search engines.
Use popular keywords in the titles, descriptions and tags of your videos. This helps YouTube’s algorithms understand your content better and offer it to the right audience.
The title
Make the title bright and catchy so that it makes users click on your video. But remember relevance: the title must accurately reflect what the video is about. Nobody likes plain clickbait!
Here is an example of working titles from the dental clinic “Vse Svoi”. Questions, numbers and highlighting the main ideas in capital letters all attract attention and match the content. Note also that the titles go together with a single design style of the covers, which works well alongside the text title.
You can add provocation too. Bright titles and covers attract attention; what matters is that they match the topic of the video and your target audience. Provocation is a good, essentially free tool. The point is to use it wisely. KLIKKLAK do not hesitate to use screaming titles on their channel:
The three key metrics of virality
- Click-through rate (CTR).
- Average view duration (AVD). YouTube has a detailed graph that shows, second by second, when and how many people close the tab with your video.
- Average percentage viewed (AVP).
Look at the graph from the study below. The line shows the attention span of the 60 million people who watched this video. We can see exactly when each viewer dropped off. Like almost every video on YouTube, the first minute has the biggest loss (look). That is why it is important to pay attention to the first minutes and do everything to make them as good as possible. In this particular video, 21 million viewers were lost in the first minute.
The ability to work with these metrics is critical. Almost all videos on YouTube lose most of their audience in the very first minute, so that minute is made attractive enough for a person to stay and keep watching. Use questions, touch on burning topics and tell stories. Everyone loves stories!
The analytics you can see through your channel. For example, a graph of when the viewers of the channel are most active on the platform.
How the YouTube algorithms work
The platform’s algorithms filter videos for the requests of each particular user. The platform takes many factors into account: views, likes, dislikes, comments, subscriptions.
YouTube uses a combination of machine learning methods and ranking algorithms based on how users interact with the video.
The main idea: the stronger the audience response, the more likely you are to get into recommendations.
It is important to understand what “a lot” means to the algorithm: the difference between zero and 1,000 is bigger than the difference between 1,000 and 100,000. So as soon as you have a few thousand views, you have everything needed for ranking, and your chances of getting into recommendations are higher too.
- Share links to your videos on social networks such as Telegram, VK, VC and Dzen.
- Use targeted advertising to extend reach.
- Find partners among well-known bloggers and influencers in your field. Joint projects let you reach a new audience and strengthen your brand’s authority.
- You can also simply leave comments under other bloggers’ videos, increasing mentions of your brand: good old guerrilla marketing.
Remember what the point of a YouTube channel is: not to collect views, but to increase your business’s sales. Do not forget to add a link to a landing page and to work mentions of your services into the video naturally.
More on guest blogging
Collaborating with other YouTube users is in essence the equivalent of a guest post in video form, and it can significantly raise brand awareness. Approach relevant bloggers in your niche.
It is really simple. Find the contact details in the “About” section of the channel and choose where to send your message.
Introduce yourself, say how much you like the channel, explain the idea of a joint video and how you can be useful to each other.
You do not even have to meet face to face on video: you can record while talking remotely over FaceTime, Google Meet, Skype and so on.
In fact, data from Social Marketing Writing showed that 62.96% of people find blogs with several authors more trustworthy.
Your business needs authority, qualified traffic, relevant links, motivated leads and sales. Guest blogging can give you all of that and more.
According to HubSpot, inbound marketing tactics (such as guest blogging) not only help you bring traffic to your site, but can also increase your revenue.
What about SEO?
Your main goal is to bring the video to the top of YouTube search results, but it also gets the extra benefit of ranking in search engine results.
Videos often appear in search results, and this can increase the number of views.
Keywords can be a good boost for your views, and you can maximise your chances of appearing in search queries by targeting phrases such as: review; what is; explained; how to; step-by-step guide. Not every video has to use such words. You can add them to the description too.
Now back to YouTube optimisation. There are two main parts of the ranking algorithm you need to know.
Neil Patel’s research also shows that Google ranks long videos (blue) better than short ones. Inside YouTube, however, short videos are more popular than long ones. That is why it is important to have content of varied length.
Part 1: information about your video
The first thing YouTube looks at is how relevant your video is to the search query.
It is a fairly simple search engine; it looks for keywords in three areas of your video:
- title
- description
- tags
Include the keyword once in the title, once or twice in the description and in the tags, if it makes sense. That is enough.
The signal words “how”, “what” and “why” are spread evenly through the text. A good example.
Note that the description contains much more information than just the keyword. This makes the description the main source of additional information for the YouTube algorithm.
Part 2: user engagement and feedback
Instead of using only the basic information supplied with the video, YouTube also takes into account how users interact with your video.
The simple concept is that if users show they really like your video, it is probably good to show to more people. Naturally, the algorithm ranks it higher.
So what does it look at?
First, which part of the video most viewers watch.
If they all leave after the first 10 seconds, that is a bad sign. But if 50–60% of your viewers watch the whole video, that is fantastic. Today anyone can see which part of a video is watched the most, if the video has timecodes:
You can check this in more detail in your account statistics, where you will see a graph similar to the one above.
Where else can YouTube get feedback?
- Total views. From YouTube’s point of view, if a video gets many views without help from search ranking, it must be good. More views usually lead to better rankings (provided audience retention is good).
- Views from subscribers. If a video is really good, many people who watch it will press “Subscribe”. Likewise, nobody subscribes after watching a bad video.
- Saves to favourites or shares on social networks. As with subscriptions, people share a video only if they like it.
- Comments. If a video causes many comments, you might think it is good. But YouTube cannot give the number of comments much weight, because comments can be negative.
Using all these factors, YouTube gives each video a corresponding score to decide how to rank it.
Small things that matter a lot
Description
The “About” section can be the decisive moment: whether people subscribe to your channel or not. Many first-time viewers will go there to learn more about you. Put the features and details of the channel in the description. You can also add promotions and promo codes here.
An example from the same Skyeng.
Frequency and recognition
Few people remember a brand and understand its use for themselves the first time. Recall the standard sales funnel: with YouTube videos it will not differ much, given that the purpose of the content is to increase the business’s sales, as we said.
So you need to publish content regularly. Not necessarily every day, especially at the very beginning. Try several times a week or even a month, but do not let the channel sit idle.
A typical problem of new channels is that no viewer understands how often new videos will appear. So it is best to create a schedule and put it in the “About” section. You can change it later anyway.
And remember that videos are visual content. Everything you show will be associated with your brand. Decide who will be its face or faces. Do not involve all the employees you have, because they change. The best option is managers, founders and owners. If they do not want to be on camera, you can pick separate people or models to represent the brand. But then remember that such an employee may leave, and an audience that has got used to them will be upset. Even that can be played up in an interesting way.
An example video from the coffee shop VARKA about an employee leaving who will no longer appear on camera, and the comments under it.
Publishing time
On weekdays it is better to choose lunchtime, 12:00 to 14:00, and the evening, 17:00 to 21:00. You can publish at weekends too, but not early, roughly after 11:00, so that everyone is sure to be awake.
What is the best time to publish on YouTube? Here is another study by Neil Patel on when to post content. It also favours the morning hours.
Working with comments
Yes, comments are not the most important ranking factor for a video. But they do affect it. React to positive comments, encouraging more of them. Working with negative ones should be done even better. Do not leave them unanswered (unless they are outright insults), but do not use stock brush-offs either. Joke, start a dialogue, ask what the person did not like.
Cutting big videos into pieces
YouTube itself gives priority to YouTube Shorts, and short videos keep gaining popularity.
Since YouTube Shorts appeared in 2019, its popularity has grown steadily. In September 2022 Alphabet announced that YouTube Shorts collect more than 30 billion views a day. The number of monthly users also grew from 1.5 billion in 2022 to 2 billion in 2023.
Accessibility is one of the biggest advantages of Shorts. These videos are simple and convenient, and they have very limited length (60 seconds), so it is important to make the video informative. If you have already prepared a long video, cut it into the brightest moments and post them in Shorts. You will see that you collect more reach.
Contests and giveaways
Social signals are not an empty sound. If you want more of them, involve the audience with contests and giveaways. At first the prizes do not have to be expensive; excitement matters more. Ask people to write a comment and pick the best one, let subscribers repost and tag you on other social networks. By the way, this also helps you move subscribers to all your other channels.
Yury Dud ran a contest together with Animal Jazz for musicians: you had to upload your best song to YouTube, and the winner played as the opening act at an Animal Jazz concert in Moscow.
Of course, that is a large-scale story, but you can adapt the idea to your own subject. For example: a joint broadcast, advertising, a free service. Say you are a designer: give away a logo. There are plenty of options, and only your imagination and means play a role.
Look how many participants!
Intro
If the video is long, and especially if it is long, make an intro. A short opening sequence where you show the most memorable moments of the video, to intrigue and interest the viewer. Now on YouTube you can set timestamps across the whole video. Use this tool to get views from interested people instead of skipping ahead. It is also useful for those who watch a video in several sittings.
See the label? “What is this interview about?”*
* Recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation.
Calls for a response
In the video be sure to use phrases: a call to subscribe to the channel, like, press the bell and leave a comment. All video bloggers do this, even the most famous ones.
In one of his videos Artemy Lebedev mentioned that a call to subscribe improves conversion. And if you do not ask, people subscribe and like less often.
You can add all these calls in the video description, too.
A bit of statistics, and a conclusion
According to Mediascope for 2024, these are the platforms where users spend the most time on YouTube:
Remember that video marketing is not quick. You will see the effect and the first audience only after several months. So set yourself a checkpoint (for example, in six months) at which you will assess the strategy for your further path on YouTube. And compare only yourself now with yourself in the past, because other people’s experience may simply be survivorship bias, or the bias of the non-survivors.
Should you go to Russian platforms: VK Video, Rutube?
And the answer straight away is yes. Statistics make the case easier:
- Users started downloading the Russian services VK Video and Rutube more often after YouTube slowed down, according to App Store and Google Play data.
- Downloads of the VK Video app grew 4.5 times against the monthly average.
- Rutube also appeared on TVs as a full channel.
Because of the YouTube slowdown, many popular bloggers moved to Russian platforms, so the audience there is only growing. That is why, in parallel with YouTube, it makes sense to upload videos to other video platforms too.
PS: the video content trends for 2025 have already been published in this study, and we made a digest of it in our Partners Digest (go there and subscribe for free).