How does social networking fare for your channel?

U

unknown_user0032

I Love YTtalk
I have always been a huge ambassador for 'social networking is useless' when it comes to my channel. I've not gained a single subscriber or view from Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, my blog or Reddit. Someone even kindly tweeted my channel link to over 900 people and not one subscriber (and about 5 views which fell in with my daily averages anyway) came from it.

Yesterday, I tried my hand at Reddit. First, I floated about leaving a few comments to mingle, and then I posted a link to my channel.

Instantly I had about 9 dislikes. The only like was the automated one it gave me when I posted. Now, I know my videos are decent (I wouldn't be where I am otherwise), so what's the beef?

The beef is, I believe, that you need to be popular to get popular. These people don't know me, and since the internet is such a hateful, unhelpful place, dislikes are what people do best in this world. Why should they care about my channel? Sure, if I posted a Tobuscus video, they'd jump on the wagon and love it to death. I don't mean that to sound egotistical or bitter, but this is true.

If I already had 5000 followers on all my social networking sites, I'd no doubt have a few more thumbs up. But I don't, so I won't.

Does anyone else believe that social networking is pointless unless you already have a good following behind you?
 
I'm not getting any profit from social networks. Facebook page has only 6 likes (2 of them got yesterday *happy*) so it can't really help me. At Twitter I have about 115 followers, but that's because it is my old personal twitter account which I rebranded, and most of folowers aren't even active^^ At the beggining I used to post videos on reddit, but didn't get ANY response so I decided to stay away from it.
 
I did an experiment on how effective social media is for us. For the past 10 days, I've used a link tracker on all videos that are posted on our Facebook and Twitter accounts to see how many clicks we get. We have around 4300 Facebook followers and 4000 twitter followers. So far, the most successful link has 168 clicks and that video has around 11,800 views. Which means our best result is 1.4% of views came from our social media accounts. Most were a lot less than this. So it's not really effective, but only takes 10 seconds to post a link on each account so we are sticking to it. Our Facebook page is valuable because it allows more personal interaction with our fans.

Btw, I've never seen self promotion work on reddit. In order for a video to do well there, it usually has to happen naturally and come from a very active and well repped account. We don't promote on reddit, but some of our fans will link our videos on there. We haven't seen any benefits from exposure on there at all.
 
Yup, this is how I feel as well, sometimes I wonder if it would truely help much. I get better responses from hitting up forums of the games I'm covering. I've tried reddit and had so-so success with it.

As for Lets Players to succeed I think it all comes down to been at the right place at the right time, and a metric sh.. buckload of luck. I personally am hitting another low point of wondering what I should be doing but when I look back from where I came from it isnt quite as bad. I also wonder if I should head back to the game which has 3k views to one of its videos, but I wouldnt be bringing anything new to the channel. Catch 22, gods I hate them
 
Social media is worth the investment but it takes time and persistance.
Facebook takes a long time to build up and Twitter is a very fickle place, followers come and go on an hourly basis over there.
Out of the 2 I think Twitter is a better place, it needs some of you followers to be retweeting pretty much everything you do to be effective.
A lot of it can also be timing, I've had some pretty good views on a video because the subject started to trend about 20 minutes after I'd posted a video. It was nothing to do with my video by the way:)
Stick with it, if you've taken the time to shoot, produce and upload a video then another 5 minutes telling the social networking world about it is time well spent :up:
 
Reddit is rough. If you're posting your own stuff it's immediately going to be recognized as self-promotion, always better to have someone else post it.

As for social media in general, I don't really worry about it too much, which is lucky since it's growing so slowly. But the tweeting and facebook sharing of videos is automatic so it takes absolutely zero effort to at least keep it up to date with my uploads, so why not?
 
Wreckless Eating said:
I did an experiment on how effective social media is for us. For the past 10 days, I've used a link tracker on all videos that are posted on our Facebook and Twitter accounts to see how many clicks we get. We have around 4300 Facebook followers and 4000 twitter followers. So far, the most successful link has 168 clicks and that video has around 11,800 views. Which means our best result is 1.4% of views came from our social media accounts. Most were a lot less than this. So it's not really effective, but only takes 10 seconds to post a link on each account so we are sticking to it. Our Facebook page is valuable because it allows more personal interaction with our fans.

Btw, I've never seen self promotion work on reddit. In order for a video to do well there, it usually has to happen naturally and come from a very active and well repped account. We don't promote on reddit, but some of our fans will link our videos on there. We haven't seen any benefits from exposure on there at all.
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Here's another point, many of your subscribers on your social media are already subscribers to your YouTube channel, and get updates anyway, right? So they are still watching your videos and that should be taken into consideration I think. I think it works better as just a way for us to remind our viewers we're out there doing stuff even if they don't click right away. I could be way off here! :)
 
i actually have no luck as of late with social networking
my theory:- its a mixture of a few things, im daily vlogging, so after a while spamming everyday is peeving people, which is understandable.
Also my location, so friends and family, are not very youtube savvy or enthusiastic unless its someone getting hurt, so i hardly get any shares as they
are unaware of what im actually doing lol even though i prompt to share and like and the obvious lack of numbers.
but an audience comes in time i guess, so soon my friends will be balanced in the favour of youtubers and my audience, then so hopefully achieving more views
through it...hmm lol
 
My facebook has been huge for me. Also had some hits on reddit. And 4chan has really liked a couple of my vids.

Video games are totally saturated. No one needs anymore. you have to add something interesting.
 
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