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What’s Youtube Shorts And Why You Need To Start Making Them
Youtube Shorts is a new audience growing life-hack every creator needs to take advantage of before they can’t anymore.
Shorts are YouTube’s method of venturing into the short-form content market to compete with Meta and TikTok. As the number of Short creators and viewers is on the rise, there has never been a better time to start a Youtube channel or grow your existing one.
Throughout the last quarter of 2021 we ran an A/B test to see if YouTube Shorts are actually worth it, and here’s everything we found.
What are Youtube Shorts?
Youtube shorts are a mobile-optimized, short 60-second form of youtube video content. Officially launched in July 2021, Youtube shorts had a massive impact on the way Youtube content is
consumed.
Available worldwide, any content creator can use Shorts for its aggressive organic reach and skyrocketing YouTube channel engagement.
Today, 30+ billion Youtube shorts are viewed per day, with still a massive untapped potential for creators, such as the new short advertisements.
Why do you need to post Youtube Shorts?
Like anything new to social media, Youtube shorts are a shortcut, or rather a tool to build your audience as fast as possible.
When compared to competitors, Youtube is a much more rewardful platform for content creators, and usually a much harder platform to grow an audience on.
Going from 1,500 followers to over 200k subscribers in under two months with some shorts accumulating over 42 million views was shocking.
Whilst conducting an A/B testing experiment, we took the same humorous, relatable content we post on TikTok using two different methods.
3rd party app Downloaded TikToks:
In the first method, all short-form video content was downloaded through third-party apps of TikTok, such as Snaptik. The videos were then scheduled for every morning at the same time for at least two weeks.
The video downloads from TikTok lost quality in the downloading process, potentially because of the tools used. These lower-quality videos ended up generating a few thousand views per clip, rarely exceeding 20,000 views.
High-quality original content:
We took the same raw footage and pre-edited videos, and ran them through Cap-cut, a video editing software to include captions and music.
The results were shocking and encouraged us to go back and find even older original content and schedule it, just to maintain the posting streak.
Through the process of trying two different methods, we learned a lot about how Youtube shorts works, enabling us to surpass a set goal by x200 times.
Are Youtube shorts still relevant in 2023?
Yes, Youtube shorts are basically the TikTok version of Youtube that tailors to short attention spans in the form of a 60-sec clip.
Youtube is aggressively pushing Shorts to claim their spot in the short-form video market, in fact in 2023, Youtube is launching a new monetization system for Youtube Shorts.
Another incentive for creators to switch platforms, and for Youtube to increase revenue streams.
Despite this, YouTube will waive a requirement for creators who get at least 10 million Shorts views over a 90-day period.
If the Youtube shorts space remains at its current highly in-demand state, those numbers are easily attainable for a creator who’s generating 100,000+ views across other social platforms.
Better yet, YouTube Shorts ads are coming in 2023. Here’s what creators need to know.
Youtube Shorts best practices
Use High-quality videos:
The key to growing your Youtube channel is consistency and good content, just like any other social platform. But how they’re posted plays a major part in how fast you will grow.
Use only high-resolution footage, at least to start. While also considering the viewer experience, we recommend adding background music, and captions of a readable size, and making the shorts as short as possible.
Use Popular Hashtags:
Hashtags don’t really have many posts on Youtube, including the appropriate hashtags in your video description will help you kick-start your Youtube growth.
Through posting humorous content and using the two main hashtags #shorts and #funny, The Silver Youtube Plaque of 100,000 followers was sent within the first month of posting daily.
Use Youtube Studio to post Daily:
Just like any other social platform, consistency is key. You must consecutively post shorts to have your content continuously suggested to people who have previously engaged with your content.
You can easily schedule your Youtube Shorts on the Youtube Studio Dashboard, by simply using the create button located in the top right of your dashboard.
Choose the content you’d like to upload, run through the posting steps, and set all your videos to be posted around the same time every day. A step-by-step guide on how to schedule Youtube Shorts
Help the algorithm help you (Bonus Tip):
If you want to speed things up, engaging with your shorts helps the algorithm promote your content.
There are two main ways you can go about this extra initiative. You can either create a few other Youtube accounts and interact with your daily posted content.
Or ask family and friends to leave a comment every time they see your Youtube Shorts, and they’ll be seeing them quite often if they’ve engaged at least once.
What does the Youtube Shorts algorithm favor?
Through testing a range of different content and posting methods, we found that the Youtube algorithm favors video quality and consistency more than anything else.
Subsequently, just like TikTok, Youtube pushes the same creators’ videos to anyone who interacted with the previous content from the same creator.
To make the Youtube algorithm your best friend, launch your Youtube content with the best-performing previous short-form content you may have.
We believe your best shot at making the algorithm work for you is upon launching; if your first few videos perform well, everything will follow along.
Additionally, our suggested method of growing your channel is just one of many that worked for us personally. You can do so much more using Youtube Shorts and its embedded editing features.
Just like TikTok and Instagram Reels, you can add different trending audios, create attention-grabbing thumbnails, and add animated text.
