- I know what you're thinking, over 100,000 views
and nearly 200 subscribers with just 10 minutes worth
of work sounds impossible,
but I can actually prove it kind of.
- [Narrator] VidIQ.
- [Woman] VidIQ.
- [Man] vidiq.com
- Keep telling people to use YouTube stories
and I don't use them myself so let's practice what I preach.
If you have any questions about your channel, VidIQ,
or YouTube, subscribe if you haven't already done so,
post a comment, and I'll reply with a video.
So yes, admittedly the technique used to gain these views
and subscribers was through YouTube stories,
but before you jettison this video
because you don't have access
to YouTube stories, consider this.
This technique isn't necessarily about the tools
that you have at your disposal.
Whether it is the community tab or YouTube stories
that many of you don't get until you have 1,000 subscribers,
10,000 subscribers.
This is about creating a relationship.
Directly connecting with your audience,
offering them personal value that makes them feel
as if the creator is talking to you directly as a viewer,
and what better way to do that than with a Q and A
or ask my anything type of content?
I've included visual prompts to help communicate
what I'm offering in the video.
I'm doing a cheeky little call to action
to ask people to subscribe.
The neat thing about YouTube stories is
that they reach people who haven't yet subscribed
to your channel.
So if they do find this stuff valuable,
there's a handy subscribe button
I am prompting people to tap.
This call to action strategy is not limited
to YouTube stories.
When you're presenting your videos, you could promote people
to check out the branded watermark down here
to subscribe if they're on a desktop computer
or if somebody's watching through a mobile device,
then you could have a subscribe graphic that appears
on screen and remind everybody watching that if they want
to grow their channels with us,
subscribe to see more content just like this.
Do you see what I did there?
Now, it may be that I haven't provided
enough value to you yet.
So we're gonna do a mini Q and A right now.
If you've got any question about your channel, VidIQ,
YouTube in general, post it in the comments below
and I'll do my best to answer as many as I can.
I'm not gonna promise to answer all of them
'cause there's likely to be 100s,
but if you find my answer valuable then consider subscribing
because you get more of that when you watch VidIQ.
Anyway, that's my little offering via YouTube stories.
Over many years, we've cultivated this kind
of audience engagement which is
why this 15-second YouTube story resulted in 198 comments
and the really important thing about all of this is that
if you're going to promise value to your audience,
just like with thumbnails and titles,
you have to deliver with your subsequent content,
and so that's exactly what I did.
I started swiping through all of their YouTube stories,
pressing record, and giving each one
of them a personal answer.
Well, as many as I had time to do,
and so here are the questions along with my answers
to 41 of those questions.
I would, of course, have loved to respond to all 197 of them
but time doesn't allow me such luxuries.
Also, insert whatever egg joke you like right now
if you're that way inclined.
Now let's start to take in some of the numbers.
The initial 15-second YouTube story
got fantastic engagement.
250 likes, nearly 200 comments, and almost 20,000 views,
and then for each subsequent response I made to a comment,
each of them 15 seconds long, got 1,000s of views.
Admittedly, the more questions I answered,
the less views each one got, probably due to viewer fatigue,
but let's look at it from this perspective.
I made 42 YouTube stories.
Each of them you can't really edit
and they're 15 seconds long which comes
to a grand total to 630 seconds,
and for that time span engaging with our community,
it earned us 118,000 YouTube story views.
It's not a bad return on investment then, is it?
And remember, these YouTube stories
not only hit your subscribers, but people who YouTube think
might be interested in your stories.
So if you go to the analytics in your Creator Studio,
click on subscription source and then filter
by stories only, you can see that over the seven days
these stories were on our channel feed,
we gained an extra 187 subscribers, and that is how
by talking into your mobile phone for 630 seconds
you can get 118,000 views and 187 subscribers.
Now of course, it wasn't quite as simple as that.
I had to keep scanning through the stories, reading them,
and considering my response through years' worth
of experience on the YouTube platform,
and then actually recording them takes time
because I keep fumbling my words and having to rerecord.
All told, responding to 41 of these comments
from YouTube stories took around about an hour,
an hour and a half, but even so I don't think I could create
a YouTube video in 90 minutes and have so many views
and so many subscribers.
Of course, I can't just do YouTube stories
in the same way I can't just do community tab posts
or just do live streams.
It all has to be a broader YouTube strategy,
but what I am doing is using each of the YouTube features
and tools to reach viewers to their maximum potential.
So whether or not you have access to these features,
the important piece of string that threads all
of this together is community engagement,
connecting with your audience and making them feel valued
and that they are part of our shared YouTube journey.