- Evan has over one million YouTube subscribers
and today, we're gonna talk about one of the things
that he did with engagement on his channel
that really boosted his numbers even more.
That's comin' up.
(electronic music)
Hey, guys.
My name is Tim Schmoyer and welcome to Video Creators.
We are all about helping you grow your YouTube body
so you can spread a message that reaches people
and changes their life
which is what Evan basically does full-time
on his channel everyday
reaching millions of people.
Over a million subscribers.
In this series,
this is episode number six of a 10-part series
about what he did behind the scenes to grow his channel
from zero to one million subscribers
so that you can do it the same.
So click the card you see around here
to go back and watch episode number one
and catch up on where we are here.
Today, on this video, we're talking about the engagement.
So what did you do on your channel
that made a big difference?
- Reply to every single comment.
- How many comments is that?
- [Evan] Now, hundreds.
- [Tim] A day?
- [Evan] Oh yeah.
- [Tim] Yeah.
- Yeah, yeah, hundreds a day.
Okay, here's the thing.
At the beginning of a channel, when you get a comment,
it's the best, right?
(laughs)
When you first get started.
- Thanks, Mom.
(laughs)
- Right.
You know, I had a video that was three years old
that like just got its first comment on that video.
I remember when I, in the early days,
most of my videos got no comments, zero comments.
If I got one comment on five videos, it'd be like,
"Wow, I got a comment.
"It's amazing."
You just, you treasure it.
It's easy to respond and you want to respond.
The challenge comes when you start growing your channel.
For those of you watching who are a little more established,
it's difficult.
You can't respond to every single comment.
So what a lot of the YouTubers do is
they'll say, "Okay, I'll respond within the first half hour
"of this video going live,"
or, "I'll spend an hour a week doing comments
"'cause I have to spend my time doing something else."
For me, that mindset just brings me back
to video number one in this series which was around
you have to think like an entrepreneur.
You have to think like a CEO.
So at the beginning of any business,
if I'm selling flowers on the street, I'm doin' everything.
I'm picking the flowers, I'm selling them,
I'm doin' customer service, I'm doing everything.
But if I then expand and I have a flower shop,
I'm not doin' everything anymore.
Like, I'm not gonna respond to every person
who comes in the door.
That's why you build a team, right?
So that same analogy, you know,
I see somebody who's leaving a comment
as one of my customers, somebody that I'm serving.
You wouldn't have somebody come into your flower shop
and not talk to them.
- [Tim] Right, right.
- But it doesn't mean it has to be you.
So what I do is I built a team
and they respond as themselves.
They're not responding as me.
It says hey, Luca or Sandra or whoever it is.
- Luca responds to me usually.
- Luca responds to you?
And it's not the same
as getting a response from the creator.
- But it's still meaningful.
- It's better than nothing.
- I'm like, "Oh, I was noticed."
- Most of the comments that I get
are probably the same as you guys.
It's like great video, thank you so much,
learning so much, it's inspirational, amazing.
Those things are great.
I don't need to see them anymore.
What I want to see is all of the bad stuff
and all of the suggestions.
Anytime somebody hates on me or on the video
or says, this sucks for these like eight reasons,
I want that.
So my team goes through all of the comments
and then pulls out the ones that I need to see.
We set criteria for what makes it to me.
Then, the rest, they responded to.
So we get hundreds of comments every day
and everybody's getting a response.
When somebody gets a response, they're what?
Seven times more likely to subscribe to your channel.
So you want to be responding to every person
who's leaving comments on your channel.
The good ones you want to heart and especially,
like the heart ones now show up at the top
where everything else gets buried.
So like the negative comments you can bury just by...
You could pin one to the top,
but then you could heart the ones
and they'll come up to the top
and they get notified, like hey, Tim hearted my comment.
They come back to the video and watch it again maybe,
but they're also building up like, "Man, I feel good.
"I feel recognized."
- Yeah.
- I feel recognized for leaving a comment on Tim's channel
and look, I got this appreciation.
I think making the practice
of going to every single comment, giving a response,
we try to do it within 24 hours,
and then doing other little things
to like surprise and delight.
I love going randomly
and checking out my subscribers' channels
and leaving comments on their videos.
I think this is a great thing for anybody watching.
If there's a creator that you like
and you're learning a lot from their content
and nobody's commenting, just leave a comment.
If you appreciate it, like just say something.
- I don't think you have to be at any level.
It's just like recognition is, I think,
just human regardless of what size channel you are.
- Every time I'm on a smaller creator's channel
and I like the content, I always leave a comment.
Just to train yourself.
Just show some appreciation for the other creators out there
'cause it's so hard.
You guys know how hard it is to build a channel.
So if you see somebody at the start with no comments,
learn and practice being the first to comment
on people's videos, not for strategy and like first, right.
(laughs)
But just to show some love
because that karma, I think, is practical.
- How do you guys manage that as a team?
Is everyone just a manager of your channel
and then they just go to YouTube.com/comments
and everyone's just kind of like catchin' up in there
or do you use other tools or what?
- There's a bunch of tools.
We use AgoraPulse and it brings in
all of your social media comments.
So if Luca's working on one, he'll claim it
so nobody else can do it and then he can also assign it
to me to say, "Evan, you need to see this one."
- This is your comment, yeah.
I love AgoraPulse.
The only thing it doesn't do is
you can't heart comments in there yet.
- Yeah.
It's part of the API.
- Right, yeah.
So there's nothin' they can do about that.
That's not their bad.
- And you can't pin either, I'm pretty sure.
- Yeah, but if you're getting, like across all my channels,
I get around 1000 comments a day, all channels combined.
- That's a lot of comments.
- Yeah, we have a lot of channels too.
(laughs)
Then, like it would just, AgoraPulse is the only way
that we could just get in there
to like just crank through all of them.
Engagement on your channel is important,
but also is taking that engagement and those people
and getting them into an email list
and something that you can control
to send your videos out to them and other things.
So we're goin' on to video number seven of this series.
Click the video on your screen to go watch that.
You can click the other thing to go all the way over
back to the beginning, watchin' episode one.
We'll see you guys in the next video,
episode seven about emails.
See you there.