Sorry I am late in this. But I am trying to figure out this audience retention and see how I can improve it.
No. 1. Don't ever promote?
I am trying to understand this a little bit more.
I am running a promotion experiment now with Adwords. I want to compare how audience retention from native search/recommended versus Adwords audience retention compares. This is the first weekend I've run the ads over, and it will take a few days for results to update in analytics.
Basically, the "don't ever promote" comes from the idea that people you promote your videos to on Twitter/FB/Instagram/etc/etc will likely click in and click out within a few seconds, giving your horrible retention. This will kill your videos. Unless you can find a very-engaged audience/community outside of YT.
I am sort of agreeing with this idea, as our own results indicate that click-through from the social media networks to YT is very low. Maybe if you get big it gets better, I don't know.
The idea of don't promote is you let native YT algorithms discover your content and promote it for you. If you get good retention, YT will place the videos higher in search.
The reason that I like adwords for promotion, is that it is highly targeted. You are on the network where people want your content, and YT promotes your videos to people who are searching for your style of content. The click rates are 1.5% - 6% for some keywords (for us). Which for us is much much higher than click-through from Instagram/FB/Twitter. Hence why I am starting to believe in the 'don't promote' idea, but for outside YT networks.
Having said that, threads on here point to good experiences with reddit and Twitter. I think those are highly targeted to specific audiences on those networks. That seems to have worked for some people. It is a matter of finding your target audience and engaging with them, not blindly promoting everywhere. your audience can be anywhere on the net, but the vast majority of it is already on YT. You just have to reach them.
Happy Easter weekend all!!
