Planning Your Social Media Strategy For Youtube

YouTube has an astronomical reach — over 122 million people visit the app or website every day.

To leverage YouTube as an opportunity, brands must create the best content for who, what, and why you’re marketing – and that starts with planning your strategy. Here we’ll take a look at what you need to know to create a winning YouTube social media strategy.

Why is Having a Strategy for YouTube Important?

Building a YouTube content strategy helps you pinpoint who you’re trying to reach and how to best reach them. Since YouTube is the second largest search engine, you’ll want to optimize your content for its algorithm, like you’d do for Google. Further, having a strategy sets your brand up for success to be able to:

Expand your content to larger audiences
Increase brand visibility
Optimize search visibility
Harbor trust, credibility, and authenticity
Propel sales and traffic
Produce leads
Generate revenue

Things to Consider When Creating a Youtube Strategy

If you plan to make a random video, publish it on YouTube, and become a viral brand sensation overnight, please go buy a lottery ticket!

Otherwise, there are many things to consider before creating content on YouTube. First, think about how to reach the right people and further, locate where they are on the platform. This is the first way to bring reciprocated value to the content you share.

Who is your target audience?

Over 720,00 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube daily; that’s a lot of clutter. So, you must ensure you’re producing videos for the right people for your brand. When beginning to determine your target audience, as the following questions:

Who are you making the videos for?
Why are they using YouTube?
What are users already watching that is relevant to your brand?
Where are they located, what age group are they in, what is their gender, and does their occupation play a role?

To find these answers, leverage consumer insight, keyword research, social listening data, and brand objectives through a lens of video consumption.

There’s a certain balance to approach strategy on the platform. Niche content can generate new demand, but it’s a harder and longer process. And if you go too broad, you’re unlikely to cut through the clutter.

What value can you give them?

The video content you bring to the platform should intend to provide value, from education to entertainment to awareness. For example, your videos could shed light on product features, tell a heartfelt brand story, share stories of consumers’ experiences with the products or services, or include visual tutorials of product usage examples.

When people come to your channel, do they leave knowing more about the product or brand than before? The answer you should be working towards is yes.

How can you repurpose content on other platforms?

Something beautiful about social media content is how easy it is to cross-promote content to other platforms. You can share your videos directly on other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Because each platform functions differently, we recommend adding YouTube video links to your caption copy when replying to the community or updating your Instagram Bio. Links to your video content should always be easily accessible.

YouTube shorts are also a way to repurpose content on other platforms because they are shorter, more digestible forms of content that other platform algorithms — such as TikTok or Instagram — cater to. Seventy-two billion visits came from global users on mobile, while only eight billion users accessed the website from desktop devices — creating a 60-second-long, vertical range might help you meet people where they are on other platforms while still allowing you to link to the longer-form video.

Now, you’ve compiled your YouTube strategy and are ready to get the ball rolling beyond posting videos. Content is key, but so is the channel experience thereafter. Below we’ll talk about ways to enhance the experience of every visitor to your YouTube page.

Social media listening is the real-time listening of conversations and trends related to your brand as well as your industry. Social listening is one of the best means for staying on top of what’s happening with your audience so you can pivot content accordingly — your teams can utilize the AI-backed tools to understand trends, track what your audience is talking about, monitor brand and competitor mentions, and follow peak industry moments.

It’s essential to stay relevant within the social space as trends start and stop quicker than a tornado passing through town. Social media listening lets you position your brand as relevant, relatable, and aware of things outside of the direct business. Social media listening is our bread and butter at ICUC, and we’re here to help you conquer whenever you’re ready.

Community management

YouTube has a highly-engaged user base. As a brand, you are responsible for keeping your audience engaged through meaningful interaction beyond simply posting content. Interact with your audience through comments, whether it’s a like or a reply. Be kind, thoughtful, and informative. When users reach out with questions through the comments, respond promptly, and if the inquiry needs more time to be answered, then let them know you are working on it and will respond ASAP!

Transparency and availability are important factors when creating a reliable, trusted connection with users and your community — don’t leave users hanging. Remember that other users can also see how you interact with the community — you can use this to your advantage when building your strategy for community management. A question or thought from one user might answer the same question of another user before they have to ask themselves, which can also spark conversation between users within comment sections.

Consumer insights

Consumer insights are beneficial to understanding what is and isn’t working well for your brand directly from the consumer’s perspective. Consumer insight data can help your brand adjust products, services, or prices. If you’re consistently receiving the same feedback about a product flaw, then it’s something the company needs to address internally and externally.

Positive feedback through consumer insights can help you to lean more into what resonates well with your audience. In addition, you can learn to tailor and refine your content to suit current needs or wants through consumer insights.

Partnerships and creator content

Take time to discover what YouTube creators are thriving in their niche. Creators have established trusted, loyal relationships with their consumers. By creating relations, they can help your brand to make deeper connections or generate leads.

Partnership content is also an excellent way to enhance your current strategy — 60% of marketers shared that influencer-generated content performs better and drives more engagement than branded posts. Partnership content is another way for brands to get creative and open doors to “out of the box” content for your brand.

Competitor analysis

While understanding your audience is imperative, it’s also crucial to know how your competitors perform in the space. Ask yourself the following questions when taking a look at competitors:

What are they currently sharing?
How is the brand interacting with its audience?
How are users interacting with the brand?
What video content is performing well?
Are users sharing product concerns?
How often are they posting?
Are they missing information that we are providing?

Conclusion

The best way to market your business on YouTube (and reach those millions of people) starts with creating your social media strategy. Have questions about building your strategy? Talk to our social media experts. We’re ready to help.