Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I’m feeling really quite grateful for the way that the community is responding to our
YouTube channel.
So today on Growing Your YouTube Channel to 100,000 Subscribers, I want to look at a few
more community-building tools and I have a treat for us.
As I was preparing to do a webinar earlier this week, I was working with a woman named
Susan Shangle who I’ve met at several different places but primarily because we’re both
part of a Google + training group that’s run by Martin Shervington.
Now unfortunately for us, Susan is a far better student of this group than I am.
She was working with me and looking at our YouTube channel and exactly what the integration
is between YouTube and the Google + social network.
She opened my eyes to some very cool things that I was missing and not doing correctly.
Now rather than just continuing on, what I did was I stopped and we recorded the whole
session, which I’m going to give you a link to right here if you want to watch it.
It’s about an hour long and it’s just a conversation between Susan and I that I
recorded as we walked through this entire process.
But what’s going to follow here now for this particular episode of Growing Your YouTube
Channel is going to be my Reader’s Digest condensed version of things you can do in
YouTube connecting to Google + to help grow and honor your community.
Well, thank goodness for people like Susan who has the patience to walk me through what
I don’t know about Google + and its integration with YouTube.
I’m sure Susan will also be wanting to give some credit for what she’s learned from
Martin Shervington’s Google + community or business group where I know she learned
a lot of this content from but she was able to boil it all down and give me a really nice,
concise kind of a task list of what I should be doing to help support our community here
on the DottoTech YouTube channel.
One thing I’ve done well is deal with all of the contents.
My daily routine starts with me, the very first thing I do is go into our Comments area
in YouTube and to reply or acknowledge each and every comment that comes in.
It’s not that many comments.
It takes me about half an hour to do it because there’s often a little bit of research as
I look for answers.
But what I was doing, and I’ll just walk you through what I was doing then I’ll add
on or layer on what Susan taught me here, is I would go into the community in the morning.
I’ve already done it this morning but it’s now a little bit in the afternoon so there
are a few new comments in.
I haven’t posted a new video in a couple of days so there aren’t that many comments
right now but when I go into community, here are all the different comments we have.
As we look through the comments, I used to just go through and I just used to reply or
give a thumbs up to all the comments that I would find.
We can see here on the right-hand side that it’s telling me which video it’s related
to or if it’s just a channel comment.
Now I thought that that was a really good start and it is a good start.
It tells the people who are most important, the people who are on your channel all the
time that you’re paying attention.
I think it gives credibility to the channel plus I learned a lot.
I learned what you’re interested in, etc.
But I never looked very closely as I was going through this at exactly what activities each
of the people were involved in.
For example, we get down to this post from Ross and it says here that he shared it on
Google +.
What I wasn’t paying attention to was the hierarchy of love that comes on Google +.
People commenting on your posts shows that they are engaged and it’s a big help in
the Google world.
But there are even better things people can do for you than just commenting on your posts
as far as building your reputation, building your authority and helping you out where it
counts which is in Google Search.
Sharing your post, especially sharing it publicly and not sharing it to a private group, is
the most over expression of support as far as Google is concerned.
Google looks at people whose posts gets shared and say wow, those people must have valuable
content and so they elevate the rankings in Search.
Looking for those markers as I go through is something that I haven’t been doing and
now I’m going to increasingly do.
Now as in all the Google world, there are multiple points of entry for us to do any
activities.
Obviously as you go through, just replying to the comments, it’s a nice interface now.
When we click on Reply, it plus-mentions the person that you’re replying to so they get
a notice back and if they have shared you on their wall or on their Google + account,
your plus-mention here will also go back to their page, which is another good start.
So I’m still saying that what you should be doing very first is going through and dealing
with all of your comments here.
But it’s at that point there that my eyes were really opened.
In my routine, once I finished replying to all the comments of the community, I would
go under this notification bell here.
I would click on that and I would bring down all of my Google+ notifications.
Now this brings down everything that happens to this account.
This account that I run my YouTube channel with is my DottoTech account.
It’s not my personal account.
These are all the notifications that happen of any groups that I’m in or any activity
at all on that Dotto account.
So you can see that since I last cleared them out, there are 17 or so that are here.
Now I thought in my naiveté that this, when I click on this one here, that people adding
me to their circles was the highest form of love.
So I would go through these but I always thought I would was doing myself a great favor by
taking each of these people here and adding them to a circle of my own called Top YouTube
fans.
This is a good thing to do and to be fair, circling me, adding me to one of their circles
is a high form of support.
It means that people want to be notified.
It’s like subscribing to the channel but kind of a step beyond that because they want
notification of activities on my channel.
So adding people to that Top YouTube Fans is still a good thing.
I might name that circle differently now but it doesn’t matter.
The bottom line is that since I started doing this, maybe about a year ago now, I’ve added
just a total of 2,800 people to this that have circled my DottoTech channel themselves.
But that’s just the beginning.
That’s almost the lowest hanging fruit because as I go through now and look at the different
comments that people have added, I will come to comments like this where this person did
a mention of me or they basically did a comment back on me.
If I highlight or move my cursor over the top of their image, I can go and I can see
that I’ve got them already checked off as somebody who’s commenting on my posts.
This is the hierarchy: sharing, commenting and plussing my posts followed my circling
me which in this case the Top YouTube fans.
That’s the hierarchy of loving come our way from Google+.
If somebody shares your content, that’s the best.
If they comment on your posts, that’s the second best.
If they plus your posts, that’s a little bit easier than commenting because it’s
just clicking the plus.
That’s the third best and if they circle you, it might actually be better but we’re
going to classify that as fourth best.
So I’ve set up these circles and you can see I’ve got very few people and a lot of
those circles right now because I’ve just started them as of yesterday, adding the people.
I went through and the people who commented, I added to.
So I’m not going to have to add this every time somebody does a comment because I’ll
see when I hover over them that indeed they’re already in my comment circle.
Now if they plus-posted me or if they shared me and I see them again, I will add them to
the share circle.
Now what does adding these people to the circles mean?
Well in the beginning, right now what we’re just doing is almost like mail list-building.
We’re building groups that we know what their level of engagement is with us.
There are ways that we will be talking about downstream that we can start to work with
these groups, especially when we’re in a product launch mode or when we’re gathering
information.
There are going to be a variety of different ways that we can work with these but these
are our more solid fans on YouTube and in the Google+ universe so being able to identify
who they are as we move ahead is going to be increasingly valuable.
And as those numbers increase, they will become even more valuable.
So right now, basically I’m just setting the stage.
I’m preparing the fields to sow a crop.
I don’t know how big that crop is going to be and ultimately what it’s going to
look like but now every day I’m going to go through this.
Here’s another person who commented on several posts in a row.
So we’ll continue on looking.
This person commented.
It’s Christina so let’s highlight Christina, move our cursor over the top and let’s see.
She’s not in any of my circles yet so I’m adding her to the Comment because she commented
on one of my posts.
Now when somebody shares you on their wall or shares you on their Google account, it’s
a good idea to visit their Google page, take a look and make sure that you’re commenting
back right within their account.
Again, they’re going to know that you’re back.
They’re going to know that you’re respecting and that you appreciate the fact that they
posted so you create that interaction.
These are more serious as far as I’m concerned than Facebook Likes and it’s a much better
opportunity for engagement that Facebook Likes.
I believe that we build communities in YouTube one link at a time, one person at a time,
by answering a question, by thanking them, by posting the video that’s perfect for
them, by posting a video that they requested, that they were interested in.
We build up our fan base or our community one person at a time and by going through
and basically massaging this information as we work our way through it and making sure
that they know that we appreciate what’s going on with them, I think that that’s
going to ultimately just pay off big time over the long haul.
Now having said that, let’s take a look at the second kind of stuff that Susan taught
me, which is dealing with my own Google+ account here.
I have done very little, in fact too little.
I’ve done precious little and the fact that I would just post basically it’s all about
Steve all the time on my Google+ page.
I would just basically post my latest videos.
There would be comments coming on those videos but there was very little interaction with
me other than any comments that happened to be reflected back from me commenting on YouTube.
But Susan showed me the coolest tour on the planet for Google+ people.
It’s right here.
It’s this little caret.
When I click on that, look at what pops down, the ability to pin this post to the top of
the page.
That’s useful but here’s where it gets really interesting, to create an embed link
for the post and later on I’ll show you how to view the ripples which is also really,
really cool and also to view the post activity.
But first, I want to talk about embedding the post because if you’ve been following
my series, you know that I follow a very rigid publishing routine for all of my videos.
I publish a video on YouTube first.
Then I cross-post that video onto my own blog, which is where I want to drive people to.
But I think that if I choose the Embed post here, copy this text which is just basically
an embed code, I copy that and then when we jump over into my WordPress blog, basically
onto my webpage, if we take a look at my webpage I’ll show you what the difference is.
In the past, I would just post the video.
It looks like if we take a look here at my latest post, the second post here, “Do I
like my new iPhone?” that’s done in the classic Steve model.
This is a YouTube video posted on my blog for people to see, that right there.
Then I would take that and of course, I would cross-post that to Facebook.
Susan suggested that I consider not posting the video from YouTube but instead posting
that blog post or that page post that’s happened in the Google + profile on my page.
When I post that and I put that embed code, this is how the post then looks in my website.
Now I’m not sure I love it yet but I’m not sure I hate it.
I’m just kind of coming to terms with the difference that it might make as far as search
because I’m getting a great deal of additional social proof.
Now this bottom set of social proof, of Facebook Likes and Google + shares, etc., this comes
from the social sharing tools that I have built into WordPress so it’s basically mainly
reflecting Facebook.
But look here, it’s only saying that there were three Google + shares.
That’s because that’s where people shared what I shared on my own page but in reality
this post has already 14 pluses and it has 6 comments.
So by posting this here, I create the opportunity for people to see the additional social proof
that’s happening in Google and engage with that.
It doesn’t look quite as nice I would say as this post but it does more for me as far
as building my brand in the Google universe.
Plus, they can also follow me right directly from the post and they can also see proof
of other people who have posted right away, or plussed or commented on the post.
Of course, they can just click on the center and view the video in a slightly smaller form
that I have in my embed from YouTube.
It’s an option.
It’d be nice if I could strip away a little bit of the extra stuff I’d rather not have,
say this header image here of the DottoTech.
I’ll play with it to try and figure out if I can do anything around that but the bottom
line though is that is going to be an interesting option as a different way of cross-posting
your content, possibly with far more impact in the Google Search universe which is something
that we all want.
So hats off to Susan and thanks so much for showing me this idea.
The final two things that I’m going to show you on those posts—I’m going to scroll
down to a different post here—Google’s Hidden Gem – Google Forms.
This post has done quite well as far as sharing and the amount of traffic that it’s had.
It’s probably I think around 60,000 views so it’s a nice example here.
I’m going to click on the caret now once again and I’m first of all going to take
a look at the post activity.
Now this shows me all of the pluses, all of the shares and all of the comments and the
people that have done that with this particular post.
But there’s another tool in that caret called View Ripples and this is really interesting.
This creates a kind of mind map showing where the post originated and then how it spread
out through the internet.
Watch this.
If I click on this little Play button here on the bottom left corner, it actually shows
it over time as the post got shared out and which people had more links to the share.
We can see that it’s a larger bubble for people that had more shares and more interaction.
We can see that this post over a five-month period just continues to keep growing and
growing and growing and growing.
That’s a really interesting presentation, another way of seeing the data as it goes
through.
So mastering some of these skills in Google + is essential as we move ahead.
Of course, we haven’t even spent time yet talking about what we do with these people
once they’re in the circles but that is for another video.
I wanted to keep this one relatively short.
It’s shorter than the video of Susan and I talking through all of this.
So if you want to see the unedited version, watch the video but for now you have a much
better idea of how to interface your YouTube account and your Google + account.
I’ve got to thank you all for tuning in.
I hope you found this video useful.
There are three ways of course for you to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is please subscribe this channel.
The second is sign up for our newsletter.
That way, you’ll hear about any upcoming webinars and events that we have as we teach
these different topics as well as you’ll get updates of all of my newest videos.
Finally, this video comes to you ad-free because it’s part of the benefits of being a Patreon
supporter on DottoTech.
DottoTech is supported by crowdfunding through Patreon.
If you want to know more about what Patreon is all about and discover some of the perks
involved in being a DottoTech supporter, including access to my online courses then please drop
by our Patreon page.
That is it.
Once again, my thanks to Susan Shangle.
You should check her out.
She knows her Google + stuff, does that woman.
I am Steve Dotto.
Till next time, have fun storming the castle.