YouTube is the most popular online video platform, with more than 2.1 billion subscribers and an impressive reach of 81% among social media users. The platform can promise a constant stream of income if your content succeeds in engaging viewers optimally.

Engagement denotes the quantum of visitors who explore your channel, watch videos, and interact with content through subscriptions, comments, shares, and likes.

Apart from monetizing from YouTube, a high engagement rate allows brands to divert optimum high-quality organic traffic to their respective websites.

You must, however, never indulge in underhand tactics to inflate the engagement figures else YouTube may blacklist your channel.

Proven Tips To Increase YouTube Engagement Rate

If your videos are not getting the kind of views you had visualized, don’t feel disheartened. The tips shared below will offer insights into the strategic interventions you can embrace to drive up YouTube engagement quickly.

Post Videos Consistently 

If your channel proves itself consistent and dependable in terms of providing relevant and actionable information for a targeted audience, your videos’ engagement rate is bound to go up.

Your viewership, which you have achieved through diligent application of creativity, can decline if videos don’t appear at regular intervals. 

Hence, create videos on current and burning topics frequently. This will not disappoint your viewers and won’t fade your channel from their memories. YouTube’s algorithm, too, would prioritize your content while deciding the videos for the opening page posts of new viewers. 

Strike Conversation With Your Audience

If your audience feels valued and well-treated, they will return to view your new videos and like or share them. For this, you need to keep the conversation channels open with your viewers.

The quality of interaction should be at par with that of real life. This implies that your responses should carry the same warmth which is exuded when you talk to someone in person.

Try to respond to the comments of the majority of your viewers. Within the video, describe your content in a simple manner with a clear flow to make it digestible.

Give emphasis to vital points. Insert liberal doses of humor to make the content entertaining and relatable. 

Use Annotations To Draw Attention To Your Creations

If viewers find high-quality, diverse, and versatile content on your YouTube channel, they will land on it recurrently to seek solutions to relevant problems or information on different topics. 

You can draw the attention of viewers to your other posts with annotations. They are boxes that appear at specific areas or corners of your video carrying relevant messages with links.

Annotations allow you to speak directly to your viewers. You can add them from ‘Video Manager’ under the ‘Creators studio.’ The video in which you want annotation opens up for editing.

Strategically placing annotations in your video with the proper screen time limit can substantially drive up their click-through rate. The result is a tangible increase in viewer engagement.

Apply SEO To Get To The Top of YouTube Searches

Higher engagement is the result of the higher volume of organic traffic being driven to your videos. For this, you can resort to SEO techniques like:

• Sending emails with video links to leads nurtured by you through other marketing means
• Optimizing the video for mobile viewing and rendering it responsive to smaller screens
• Creating personalized blog posts with YouTube videos embedded in them
• Collaborating with authoritative websites and other popular content creators to get backlinks to your videos
• Conducting keyword research to target strategic video keywords based on popularity and search volume
• Integrating keywords in video titles, descriptions, meta tags, etc.

Exercise due diligence in optimizing your video for search engines; hordes of relevant traffic will pour in on your videos in no time. 

Post Relevant and Eye-Catching Thumbnails

YouTube viewers never run out of options, thanks to the continuous publishing of new content.

Why would they then commit attention to your videos?

Because you have posted a seductive thumbnail with a purposeful theme that communicates what one can expect to find at one glance. You can improve the thumbnail’s efficacy in engaging prospective viewers with the following:

• Creative yet consistent style and layout characterizing your brand
• Short yet quirky text that sheds light on the subject
• Visually appealing graphics relevant to the topic
• The countenance of the host, wearing an appropriate expression

Just glance through the thumbnails of popular videos on YouTube to ignite the spark in you.

Write Meaningful and Compelling Descriptions with Keywords

You must interpret the word ‘description’ in a broad sense to engage viewers better. It becomes easier for a viewer to understand the full import of the visual content if it is accompanied by aids for better comprehension.

You can make this happen by:

• Adding an appropriate, concise, and relevant description of the video in a maximum of 250 words indicating what viewers can expect
• Providing a transcript which is a word-by-word narration of everything spoken in the video
• Including subtitles so that viewers can enjoy your video even in a muted state in crowded places or in privacy

Next time you create YouTube videos, pay heed to the aforementioned, as this will adequately ramp up your video’s engagement quotient. Research the top keywords most viewers use to search content similar to yours. Incorporate them in the description to garner more views.

Create A Strongly Persuasive Outro

YouTube outro is the concluding scene of a video where you request viewers to respond to a call to action (CTA). A good online YouTube video editor will offer attractive templates for engaging outros.

In the outro section, you can ask viewers to like, comment, share your video or watch other videos posted by you. An impressed viewer who has watched your video all through will certainly feel elated to do so.

This will bring more visibility to your videos as satisfied viewers will spread the word about your creation by sharing the content with friends or on other digital touchpoints.

Grab Attention with YouTube Shorts

Spark interest in your videos quickly and effectively with YouTube shorts. These small videos play for 15 to 60 seconds and often feature in the front-page section of YouTube.

With shorts, you can pique the curiosity of viewers about any topic covered in another video, inspire them to explore your diverse content, build excitement around an upcoming video, discuss a topic, or simply entertain audiences.

You may also include links to your main video in the Short after providing a summary of the content.

YouTube Shorts are very effective in driving engagement, as they command more than 30 billion views daily.

Include Rich Media In Your Videos

Spice and jazz up your videos with eye-catching multimedia, snappy background score, cool animations, awe-inspiring graphics, atmospheric elements, and sensory stimulations. These elevate the quality of your video, help you present your ideas in a more compelling way, and cater effectively to the short attention span of viewers.

You can leverage the features of good video editing software with different in-built YouTube templates to make your content more visually appealing, meaningful, value-added, and tantalizing.

The rich multimedia elements grippingly enamor the senses of audiences and instill subconsciously in them the desire to revisit your content or browse more of your videos.

Conclusion

The tips shared above can prove highly effective in upping your YouTube engagement rate. You need to leverage them strategically by adapting the tips to your unique content publishing set-up.

Try them and grab curious and appreciative eyeballs effortlessly on YouTube!