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
- Number of likes and dislikes (who is liking it is also important)
- Number and quality of comments
- 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 the upcoming posts, we're going to address those things one at a time, so you can learn how to increase all five factors of engagement. This post is focusing on getting people to click "Like" on your videos.
See our latest post here: Turning non-subscribers into subscribers
Getting likes and dislikes
How do you get your viewers to press the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" on your video? We have a few ways that we have found add to the number of likes we receive. Remember, a thumbs down is still engagement in YouTube's eyes! Engagement is a good thing!
Give your audience what they want
First of all, in order to get likes, you need to produce great content. Make videos about things that people are searching for or videos that your subscribers are asking for. Make sure you include a lot of valuable information in your video.
If your video is titled Traveling in Mexico With A Dog, make sure that your video is about that topic. Don't have just 30 seconds of a 10-minute video on your title topic. Try to stay on topic as much as possible! In your video, try to answer any questions that your viewers might have about what it's like traveling with a dog in Mexico.
Include pop-ups with a "like" animation
In the parts of the video where you feel that viewers are going to be the most entertained, include animations of "Like" button being clicked.
Your goal isn't to manipulate viewers into liking your video. Your goal is to get the viewers who actually do like your video to remember to click the "Like" button.
In this video of ours below, you can see a screenshot of what one of these animations could look like.
Call-To-Action
At the end of your video, you want to put a call-to-action where you'll ask your viewers to do something. Since this post is all about getting more likes on your videos, you're going to want to ask them to click "Like" if they liked your video.
Furthermore, if you want to, you can ask them to click the thumbs down if they didn't enjoy your video. Remember, in YouTube's eyes, a dislike is still engagement! We haven't been asking for dislikes in every video, but we have done it in a couple of our Tangerine Travels videos.