i really enjoy twitter myself twitter@anirhythm - i don't try to promote myself as much as share things I enjoy and find people that have similar interests. What i usually do is simply follow people that i think would enjoy my work, and they do. Basically follow people and if they don't follow you back after a few weeks, unfollow, I've actually met many people this way, i do try to be entertaining with my tweets also, art, music, inspiring quotes, and random geeky thoughts lol
- I may not have a huuge mega following, but i'm on a ton of lists that pretty much blast my tweets to the whole music industry for me - often the people from those lists like my tweets more than my own followers hehe .....and use hashtags wisely, they are more powerful than you think! follow me and I'll follow back! I don't do facebook, i like to focus on one network and hone in on my audience for the sake of time, and not being redundant.
everyone loves a fun, caring, sharing, happy, entertaining, and sincere person, if you can fake that, you got it made!!
Also very good advise! It sounds like this kinda sums up what Twitter is really good for. Thanks![DOUBLEPOST=1449701588,1449701329][/DOUBLEPOST]Hey everyone! Thanks so much for all of your comments and advise on this! It's been really helpful! I'd like to show you what a user by the name of Radedo responded with when I asked about this on Reddit.
Hold onto your butt. This is gonna be long.
Using hashtags on Twitter can help, but in my opinion they are not as important as they used to be. Twitter searches bring up terms whether or not you use hashtags for them. So for example, you can tweet "I like Minecraft" and people will be able to find your tweet whether they look up "Minecraft" or "#Minecraft".
It does help to use the trending hashtags though (trending tags are featured on the left hand side of the screen on a desktop, and in the search tab on the app), since people are likely to just click on the hashtag which makes it likely for them to see your tweet if it includes it. If you have something particularly engaging/funny you may get a bunch of likes and retweets just from that.
It's always tough to find those first few followers though. A good way to find some is going through recent Twitter exchanges on here, or waiting until a new one comes up so you can share your username too. Then you can follow people you find interesting, and maybe tag them in a "hey found you on the Twitter thread, hi!" type tweet. Another way is to look at who the people you follow are following (or who's following them), chances are you'll find some new people to follow.
Don't let the lack of followers stop you from being active though! Just like with YouTube, if people come to your page and see that you don't share regular content they won't subscribe to you because why would they?
Posting a video a day won't bother people, no need to worry, but if all you post is one link every day then you won't see much growth. We all understand that we have to get our content out there, so seeing youtubers share their uploads is kind of expected. Look at big youtubers, even they tend to share most if not all their uploads. But people use Twitter to learn about each other, meet others, they want to connect with other like minded folks, and you can't do that with just links. Talk to people, share your thoughts, your dumb jokes, interesting finds. I promise you no one will mind a link or two a day if the rest of your posts are somewhat amusing.
I don't know much about G+, other than the fact that very few people actually use it. I honestly wouldn't even bother with it.
Same thing goes for Facebook. Kind of. Do sign up for it, do make a page, and try to keep it somewhat updated, but the truth is that unless you start making it big and people start liking your page en masse, no one will see your stuff unless you pay to advertise it.
Facebook "recently" changed their algorithm so that it only shows posts that it deems worthy, instead of showing everything people posted in chronological order like it used to. It bases that on the number of likes, shares, and comments, because the more of those a post has, the more interesting it must be (to put it very simply). So if you have no one liking, no one commenting, and no one sharing, Facebook will basically not even see your content and won't push it out to people, not even if those people have liked your page. That is again, unless a post starts gaining traction.
Which brings up the point of advertising on Facebook. You can promote any of your Facebook posts, with prices ranging between a few dollars and however much you're willing to spend. I've used Facebook advertising for my main "thing" (photography) and it does work, as long as you set up the right campaign. If you think you have a video that people may find amazing, it might be worth investing some money in it, just make sure you do your research on how to set up an ad on Facebook that will yield the best results. Of course, average content will still get a bunch of impressions, but won't lead to many conversions (i.e. subscribers).
Finally, Instagram. I love Instagram. Like I said, I'm a photographer so I've been using it for years to share my work, which is a bit different than sharing selfies, updates on videos, memes or whatever the hell we may share as youtubers, but the techniques to grow a following are the same no matter what you post.
Hashtags are a million times more important on Instagram than they are on Twitter, since Instagram's searches don't look at anything else (besides username mentions and locations that is).
I spent some time trying to figure out the best way to grow a following a while back, and managed to go from about 200 followers to about 700 (in now at 1400) in just over a month.
What I would do was simple. First of all, I made sure to post every day, sometimes twice a day. I would use a fixed set of hashtags that described my photos (the name of the editing app I used, hashtags made from other accounts that would randomly feature photos under that hashtag, etc), as well as different ones to describe each photo more in detail (cow, waterfall, sunset, etc.)
Then after posting that photo I would choose two or three of those hashtags and go through the most recent posts by other people that used them too. I would "like" the photos I liked, and comment on the photos I
really liked. Not just a "Cool" or "Nice", but something a bit more personal and constructive. Without fail, within minutes I would start getting likes and sometimes follows from those same people. Sometimes they'd just reply "Thanks" and move on, but that's to be expected.
And that's it. That's really all there is to it, post regularly, tag appropriately, and love (other's work) generously.
As always, it goes without saying that if your content is great more people will follow (and not unfollow after a day).
Ok I lied, there's one more I wanna mention super quickly: Tumblr. Tumblr is great because like on twitter you can follow the people you want to follow and never have to see stuff you don't care about (unless the blogs you follow reblog something you don't care about I guess).
But what makes it great for youtubers is the fact that every link on tumblr is dofollow. Let me explain that a bit in case you're not familiar with the term.
When Google crawls the Internet to bring you the results you need from a search, it brings up websites in a certain order based on a number of factors. One of those factors is the amount of backlinks a website (or in our case, a video) has. Backlinks are exactly what they sound: links from other websites pointing toward your website/video. The more backlinks a video has, the more "legit" it is in google's eyes.
Most social media websites have nofollow links, that is, links that Google doesn't see as backlinks, which means that they don't matter in terms of ranking higher in searches. But Google
does see Tumblr links, and more importantly it sees every single one of them, meaning that if your post with a link to your video gets reblogged 1000 times, that'll give you 1000 backlinks, which in turn will make Google go "Holy s**t, this guys content must be good since everyone is linking to it, let's show it higher in search results!". Or something, I'm paraphrasing.
That's about all that comes to mind, if some of that doesn't make sense let me know, I'm happy to clarify
- Radedo -
