If you saw our post What is YouTube Engagement, and Why Engagement On Your YouTube Videos is Important?, we talked about the things that YouTube considers "Engagement" and what makes engagement so important.
There are a handful of things that constitute engagement on a YouTube video:
- How many people are subscribing to your channel after watching - See post here
- How many viewers share your content - See post here
- Number of likes and dislikes (who is liking it is also important) - See post here
- Number and quality of comments - See post here
- Viewer retention
To sum up the importance of engagement on your YouTube videos, it's one of the key factors that determine how high YouTube's algorithms will rank your video. I'm not just talking about ranking in search either. Even more important is how often your videos are being recommended to users after they finish watching a different video.
How to increase YouTube engagement
Above, we listed five things that you need to focus on when it comes to increasing your video engagement. In our previous posts, we addressed things one at a time. So those previous posts to learn how to increase all five factors of engagement. This post is focusing on getting your viewers to watch as much of your videos as possible.
Increasing view retention
Viewer retention, or how long viewers watch your video, is a hugely important factor in determining how high YouTube will rank your video. If people are watching the entire thing, YouTube takes that as a sign that it's a great video. They'll suggest it to a lot more users and it will show up higher in search results. But how do you get people to stick around?
The Bait
In the beginning of your video, you want to give your viewers a reason to stick around and watch the whole thing. That might mean putting some teaser clips in there to get your viewers intrigued. Or it might mean telling your audience what they're going to get out of the video. If it's an educational video, you can tell them "By the end of this video, you'll learn X, Y, and Z." Whatever you do, give them some bait to make them want to stay around until the end.
In the video below we used some teaser clips to give a preview of the hilarity that was about to ensue. Since it was a longer video, about halfway through, we added more preview clips of what was to come.
Save the best for last
Your viewers came to your video for a reason. If you have a 10-minute video, don't put all of the best stuff in the first two minutes. Reserve some of it for later in the video.
In the Eating Mexican Candy video above, we put some funny/intriguing teaser clips in the beginning. It would have been silly to put all of those funny parts toward the beginning of the video because then people would be more likely to click away before they finished watching the whole thing.
Remember the bait. Keep dangling that bait out there for your audience and don't let them grab onto the bait until the very end.
In this video about going to a movie theater in Mexico, we didn't put all the information out there for people in the very beginning. We gradually revealed enough information to get them to stick around but we made sure not to answer all of the questions they might have until we got to the very end of the video. I call it "Bait" for a reason. When you dangle it, they want to get it, and as soon as they grab ahold of the bait they run away.
Great content
There's no substitute for a great video. Giving your audience a high-quality production will make them want to stick around, even if you don't employ all of our other little tricks.
Relevant title
You need your content to be relevant to the title of the video. Say, for example, I have a video entitled What to expect at a massage in Mexico. Next, someone finds your video because they were searching YouTube to find out what a Mexican massage was like. If your video isn't exclusively about that topic, they're probably going to be clicking away pretty quickly. They came looking for something in particular and you didn't provide them with what they were seeking.