In the Wild West of the Internet, your audience is your livelihood.
They determine whether you succeed or fail online and it is imperative to keep your audiences engaged and interested in what you are posting. Since the advent of radio, we have enjoyed receiving information that expands our interests and engagement.
In order to keep your audience engaged and interested, you need to provide them with regular, high quality video. And in order to grow your audience, this must be done on a consistent basis. Your goal should be to increase the viewership and engagement for each of your videos. You want to create content that allows your viewers to respond and interact with you – and one of the best ways to do this is by using videos as one of your major outlets for information.
By following these few rules, you should be able to grow a devoted audience and determine what types and styles of content they watch and enjoy.
1. Length Matters
Let’s just get this one out of the way.
Say I’m in the washing machine business. Do you want to watch a 15-minute informational video on what makes my washing machines better than others? No. You probably don’t. And in all honesty, I don’t want to make a 15-minute video on washing machines.
But what if I was to tell you I had a cool 2-3-minute video on the same topic? You’d probably be more inclined to watch it.
The graph above provides a breakdown of when viewers leave a video based on that video’s length (with ‘nose, body and tail’ respectively being the beginning, middle and end of the video). As you can see, there is a clear increase in loss of viewership at the beginning of videos as video length increases. Total loss also increases as video length increases.
People have short attention spans – you need to play to this as an advantage and not as a disadvantage in order to keep your audience engaged (and present) throughout your video.
2. More Is Less
You may be thinking to yourself ‘I want some followers, so I’ll just make more and more videos!’
Don’t do that.
More is not always better. By flooding your page with videos you may end up repeating topics discussed earlier, not having a fresh video format, or losing quality in the videos that you upload. Additionally, you risk creating subscriber burn if you bombard your audience with content to the point where they no longer want to follow your online offerings. These are all things that you can easily avoid by ensuring that what you are putting out is of quality and relevance to you and your viewers.
In fact, if you’re not getting the type or number of responses that you would like, you should probably re-evaluate your release schedule and the quality/style of your media.
3. Create a Schedule
Your viewers expect consistent and timely postings of your video, whether you know it or not. If someone subscribes to your service and you fail to update them regularly, they will jump ship to a new supplier of the information and content that they desire.
Platforms such as Facebook and Youtube will allow you to schedule content as it is being updated. However, it is a best practice to review these posts once they are published to make sure they are correctly formatted and are reaching people.
Video updates once a week or every other week tend to work well for retaining viewer interest. Pick a consistent day of the week to publish each new video so that viewers will routinely tune in.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, it is important to keep in mind these key things when developing and growing your online audience:
- Be short, to the point, but informative. People expect their information quick these days.
- Don’t release too many videos in too short a time. Doing so could lead to you seeing a drop in quality or loss of interest from your viewers.
- Create a release schedule. By staggering your videos releases, you are able to retain your audience’s attention over a greater span of time, eventually fostering them into loyal followers who will watch and share your videos.
Do you agree with our points? Don’t be shy, leave a comment and let us know!
