I have a very large release of music coming up and it is ultimately going to revolve around YouTube.
I haven’t seen much on here about this, but it would be great to get people’s input and insight on how and if Instagram can be used to grow or go viral on a YouTube account.
As far as my experience goes as an artist, I have struggled to send traffic from Facebook & Instagram to YouTube, even with the full arsenal of Instagram automation and ad management knowledge I’ve accumulated.
Anyone who is open to freely discussing their tactics; let’s make this a place where people can come to find the information in question.
Interested. YouTube is still a big mystery. While sending traffic from your socials helps, there still is a different method big artists and YouTube’s use to get in the suggested videos tab where the real magic happens. I managed to make it happen once with fake views which tricked the algo, then my video got suggested and hit top tier US traffic getting 100s of thousands of views till now. It was crazy seeing how I got the 1k subs and 4000 hours watch time in a couple of days whereas before struggling to make it happen with dozens of organic videos.
But I never managed to replicate it. There is a way though that’s for sure.
From my experience it’s pretty hard to drive traffic to youtube from instagram. but if i want to promote my music video i will try to collab with big pages like “Worldstar”, post a teasing video with a call to action caption i.e(Click link in bio for the full video) and convert traffic from this page to the music video !
I managed to pull traffic across, but stopped as soon as I saw my average view time from people on Insta was about 13 seconds, compared with an average view time of about 4.35 on a 6 minute video.
Video has about 300k organic views on it.
YT tends to just promote videos to Browse ( Which is where you were by the sound of those numbers) from mainly internal traffic.
Are you sure the video didn’t just do well because it was topical or hit a trending topic?
Hundred percent sure. This video was no trending topic. Also completely fresh channel that I just used to test things. I have a couple of channels and used to test extensively trying to find the way to consistently hit the suggested page and pump out viral videos but nothing gained traction except this video which.
And yes it was internal traffic from the suggested videos tab on the right of the video as I said. At first the views were purchased consistently and slowly over a couple of days and then it got picked up by the algo and suggested videos and slowly but surely got recommended to more and more people due to high watch time and lots of people engaging and liking. And no it was nothing special. I have tons of videos that are way better more engaging, viral content and they never saw the light of day because people just weren’t suggested them.
I could upload a video now and it would barely get any views even though it is perfectly optimized, SEO, triggering thumbnail, tags, description everything. And there are tons of videos like this from creators who do everything “right” but they don’t go anywhere after years of hard work.
Yet when there is the right push it magically goes up. After being exposed to the world of IG automation and everything, it shouldn’t come too much of a surprise that similar things are going on in YT.
I remember some panels offered “Suggested views”
I kinda disagree about the algo there. Most people I speak to say they did everything right but it still flopped, yet when you look into the detail or quality of the video ( which is often subjective) it turns out something is wrong.
But by the sound of it you did your testing and this is your result.
Personally I think like you said the Algo picked it up. But it does that on data? Either search data, the viewers data or the black and white stats from the video… Be that click through rate? Watch time,Saves, Shares the speed and quality of both or any other measurable metric that comes to mind.
This idea of the AI being some all knowing diety that some people ( not yourself) put forward is nonsense.
You can get a video so far without data but to push it out like that there are many signals that need to be right for the AI.
Also these were suggested niche related views but they aren’t offering them anymore for a couple of months now.
So again, that’s what I am trying to say. The algorithm isn’t a deity. It works with data. But imagine a brand new channel, brand new videos, nobody knows about this person, nobody searches for him or his content. Yes, he might do videos on trending viral topics and optimize his meta data and tags and everything, but still, his chances of being picked up by the algo will be much less because just much less people will initially see it except if he is able to somehow direct lots of traffic to it externally.
So the method is manipulating the algo in your favor by sending fake signals to it, that mimick a viral video like views, comments, likes, dislikes, shares, saves, playlist adds, subs and do it in a natural way. That way the algo will pick it up as it deems it viral worthy. Nothing allmighty deity. That’s not what I meant it all.
At least that’s how it should work in theory. Execution is the other part and it is a lot harder because just like with IG, lots of providers are shit and youtube isn’t dumb either.
I firmly believe that there is a method that works. But if you knew about it, would you share it
let me know what your experience is. But be warned. I do not claim this will work. As I said, out of many experiments, it only worked for some vids where the timing seemed to be perfect. But as for all things in online marketing, testing, testing, testing. Maybe try some experiments on a test account and videos you don’t really care about messing up if you already have a channel that you don’t wanna mess up.
I wasn’t saying you thought YT was a deity. Sorry if it came across that way.
No. I’d quietly keep it to myself and use the magic on clients. Hand on heart in 2017/18 I had some moderate success. But I was unable to continue re-creating it.
Sadly I no longer focus on YT, but I know people that do.
Yes exactly. This is key. In an ideal scenario, you would send US (or location targetted) high retention real youtube views that YT also thinks are real and not crappy botted views.
I have given up for the time being on YT as well but I always keep it in the back of my head and think about the strategies.
The exact same thing happened to me. I had one video hit top10 of my country through fake views, but I could never replicate it. I heard that its important to not start with fake views, because youtube checks how legit the views are at around 800 Views.
