When you share a YouTube video on Twitter, on Facebook, in an email newsletter, or on your blog, you’re hoping to reach your existing fanbase — and that’s great — but it’s not doing much for you in terms of getting your music heard by a brand new audience.
Liz Uhl of AMP Records recently shared some great tips on how to attract new viewers to your music videos. I’ve summarized her advice below, but to check out the original article on the AMP website, click HERE.
Boosting YouTube views for your music videos
- Enter relevant tags. What keywords are people going to be searching for that could lead to your video? Use ’em!
- Put keywords in your description too, along with all credits for the song (players, engineer, producer, etc.) and video (director, crew, actors, etc.).
- Use a thumbnail that pops. Don’t feel like you have to use one of the defaults.
- Watch the whole video, and ask your fans to do the same. YouTube pays attention to the watch-time when considering which videos to display as search results.
- Build early momentum. You want to start off strong with as many views as possible in a short window of time. The more places your video is shared and embedded, the better. YouTube favors videos that launch with a buzz.
- Ask your social media followers to not just watch the video, but like it, share it, favorite it, comment on YouTube, and subscribe to your YouTube channel.
- Look at the data. YouTube’s analytics will give you a glimpse into what’s working and what isn’t. Test out different tags, thumbnails, and descriptions.
Of course none of these tricks will guarantee you thousands or millions of extra views, but if you apply them to your YouTube promotion moving forward, you should see better results for all your future music videos.
What do you do when you first launch a new video to get as many views as possible? Let us know in the comments below.
Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.