- This is episode five of my miniseries
of how to get more subscribers,
and today I'm gonna show you how
to get more subscribers using social media.
Here we go.
(upbeat music)
Hello, and welcome back to another video.
I'm Alan Spicer, your YouTube certified expert,
and you are right here because you want more
subscribers using social media.
Not many people understand that YouTube,
although it's got it's own valid key metrics,
is effectively a giant social media platform
where you come to listen to creators
create social content, and you engage with them.
I'm an independent forum, and you chat with me
about the topics that I throw at you.
That's a weird analogy, Alan.
But if I'm a social media platform,
why don't you pull people in through other
social media platforms to join your community?
Facebook, now this is a platform
that you should be aware of.
I mean, I'm 35 this year, so most of my formative years,
my late teens, my early, mid 20s to now,
I was pretty much on Facebook.
MySpace kinda passed me by, I never understood it.
And Twitter was a bit shouty, for my opinion.
So Facebook for me, and my generation,
it's a great way to pull people in
around your like-minded concepts.
And all you need to do is find your niche.
So I know that I make YouTube educational content,
so all I have to do is go and find fellow YouTubers
that wanna learn how to make better videos,
or other people that want to become YouTubers.
I just go and find them somewhere
in starter groups and forums.
Maybe I can offer a tip to you,
or an advanced YouTuber, that didn't understand
how to use certain pieces of software.
Or I can teach them how to use Adobe,
or I can advise them on the camera that they want,
or why upgrade it to say a Dell XPS 15.
Once you've found your niche,
you can nibble into the community,
be part of that community.
Ask questions, answer questions, make friends.
Those friends will trust you, will like your content
when you post it, not spam it, and they'll join your family.
Instagram, this is a great visual platform.
It's connected to Facebook, very easy to use.
You can even use your own Facebook logins
to setup your own account.
And what can you use is little teaser videos.
So right to the start, start of my video,
I've explained to you what this video
is about, I could crop that into
a 10 second clip, put it on Instagram.
Or I could condense all of the wonderful tips
in this video into a minute clip,
and post it onto my Instagram wall, or my story.
Why would I want to cannibalize my content like that?
Well, either it spreads the awareness of me
to a different audience so they now know who I am
and they know I'm a YouTube educator
and come and watch other content of mine,
or I've teased them enough from that one minute clip
that they want to come watch the nine minute version
on my YouTube channel where I deep dive
into every fine detail of how to,
I don't know, set up a YouTube channel,
or how to start a YouTube channel from scratch,
how to start a blog, a podcast,
or you know, how to edit using Adobe Premiere.
Instagram also has a swipe up function.
So, if you intrigue them enough within your stories,
you can then entice them to swipe up.
That then jumps them and forces them from Instagram
to YouTube, in which then you've now got a chance
to hook them, grab them, nibble on their essence of mm.
I mean, make them a subscriber.
TikTok, you know that weird playground
that all of the young aspiring video creators are now on?
Basically it's the emerging network.
You're at school, you're surrounded by a load
of other friends that happen to be in early teens,
you can get our phone, you can make funny clips
and you can upload it onto the Tok of the Tik.
I've told you how powerful this network can be.
I've even made videos, I'll put them
in the playlist up here.
Once again, don't know where I'm pointing
because I suck at doing that.
But the advantage there is that
you can hook people into something.
If your demographic's young enough,
you can hook them in and reinforce your group,
or you can pick them up and infuse them into your channel,
into your community later on down the line,
because if they know that you teach philosophy,
or physics, they know that you exist now.
So in two, three years time when they need you,
they'll come and find you.
Or you made them aware that, aw great,
this new gamer that I really love playing that, I'll go.
And they'll take their friends, and they'll interact,
and maybe because you know, the cliquey-ness
of slightly younger children,
or slightly younger demographic,
it might boost your channel pretty quickly.
TikTok's also a very good way
of showing the other side of you.
I'm serious on here pretty much 85, 90% of the time.
I'll have the odd joke, but on TikTok and Instagram stories
I can be humorous, I can be a little bit naughty,
a little bit less professional,
in which that shows my other sides, my cheekiness,
my Kentishness, my weird, funny, I hope, personality.
That might be another way for you to win
yet a different person over, because they can
now understand that, oh, he does teach that.
He seems a bit stuffy on the YouTube channel,
but he's clearly got a sense of humor,
and well, maybe I can understand him
a bit more when I go back over there again.
LinkedIn, now this is one that's been miscast for years.
Everyone has always expected LinkedIn
to just be the stuffy Facebook,
the place where you put up your CV,
you interact with other professionals,
but you don't really engage in a community.
It feels a bit stale, and wooden, and straitjacketed.
LinkedIn's changed recently.
I think it's because it's grown up
and people are understanding that the initial concept
of LinkedIn was a bit too rigid.
Now the organic reach on the LinkedIn platform is huge.
And as long as you're able to put across your expertise,
then you're able to build an audience.
Yes, it's a little bit more business focused,
but it's still early Facebook-esque.
You can still talk and chat.
It picks a niche and a topic for you based on your skill,
and then you can find other people around you.
It helps you niche down quicker,
and then you entertain or communicate and make friends
within that business version of your bubble.
The business of gaming, the business of YouTube education,
the business of caking, or the business of cooking.
Basically, you don't have to be sales, sales, sales,
you can just chat about the behind the scenes,
the cogs that grind you, your industry,
and chat about the topics within there.
Now I understand that this might not be perfect
for everyone, just like all of these platforms
depend on your specific niche.
If you have a skill or an expertise or knowledge on
something, writing articles within LinkedIn will help you.
Not only establish you as a thought leader,
but also a way to embed your video,
help them rank with external sources,
external sources leading back into YouTube,
teach YouTube that that's got some formal authority,
and therefore worth watching, and it's a good way
to honey pot and honey trap people in from your niche,
back into your community, and spread
your influence a little bit more.
Or you can take those blogs, and do them yourself.
I have two websites, one which is for my formal
web design business which no doubt I'll rebrand
at some point, but that still sells my YouTube coaching,
and has elements of my portfolio and my past on there.
I'll have a second one where
I simply post and re-blog my videos.
Why do I re-blog, why do I repackage?
Well, on the business blog I'm able
to explain how this affects your business,
and put in a relevant video that helps them
in their tutorial, and on my other one,
which is adamspicer.com, I can then
flesh out the idea of that video.
So instead of me ranting for five minutes,
I can then explain every fine detail
of that five minute tutorial, why you're doing it,
how you're doing it, link to other articles that may help,
give you visual graphics and info stuff.
Why am I doing that, once again?
YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet.
The first one is Google.
If you're having problems ranking in YouTube,
why not try to rank with quality written content
with embedded videos, some stunning visuals,
and get into the Google search results?
Because if you get into the Google search results,
and that starts bringing you traffic,
it will start getting you views.
That video will then get ranked
because it's getting external traffic
because it's clearly working over here,
clearly ranks here, so it must be important.
Then YouTube reevaluates its rank in general.
I have some videos that don't do well on YouTube,
but rank fantastically in Google search results
where you type how to delete a YouTube channel,
and I'm one of the first suggested videos
on Google, but not necessarily on YouTube.
For you to grow on YouTube,
sometimes you have to think outside the box.
And outside that box could be social media,
Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, blog posts, TikTok.
Or you could grow using any of the tips
that I've given out in this playlist here.
Or make better videos here.