Boost Views, Comments, and Likes: 7 Expert Tips on How to Increase Engagement on YouTube

Aspiring to become the next MrBeast, T-Series, or CoComelon with at least 185 million active subscribers is understandable. 

Unfortunately, the road to gaining that many followers, subscribers, views, shares, and likes boils down to mastering how to increase engagement on YouTube. If you’re a newbie YouTuber, we hear you.

Here are seven expert tips on driving more comments, shares, and likes on your YouTube channel.

Seven Ways to Boost YouTube Engagement

Check out the following for proven tips to increase your YouTube engagement.

1. Understand the Importance of YouTube Engagement

Before delving into the proven tactics for increasing engagement on YouTube, we must understand why it’s vital to do so. Otherwise, our tips would mean nothing.

Like Google and other tech giants, YouTube has an algorithm that, unfortunately, is always changing and adapting. 

Regardless, one thing never changes – engagement.

You can look at “engagement” as a sign of your YouTube channel’s relationship with followers, subscribers, casual viewers, and anyone on YouTube who happens to view and interact with your content.

Viewer interactions can be as simple as hitting the thumbs up (or down) button, downloading the content (although not all YouTube videos are downloadable), or smashing the Share icon. 

Subscribing to the YouTube channel also counts, as does smashing the bell icon.

YouTube counts your channel’s engagement or interactions and compares them with impressions, which reflects how many times viewers see your YouTube video’s thumbnail.

Many beginner YouTubers cannot differentiate between impressions vs. engagement. 

Let’s give an example.

Suppose someone saw your video thumbnails 10 times but only “interacts” with it once. In that case, your YouTube video has one engagement across ten impressions for a 10% engagement rate.

So, if your YouTube video has hundreds of viewer interactions, its engagement rate will likely be high.

It shows how much YouTube users love your content.

Here are some metrics to focus on.

• Likes and dislikes – viewer satisfaction

• Shares – how much viewers want others to watch your content

• Comments – viewer interest and interaction

• Watch time – the longer that viewers watch your content, the higher your channel’s ranking

Summing up, engagement is vital in ensuring your YouTube channel’s success, monetizing it, and moving you closer to the elite circle of YouTube’s top creators earning millions of dollars.

2. Create Valuable, High-Quality Content

You might already know this, but we will drive home the point, nevertheless. 

After all, only 1 in 10 YouTube channels succeed!

Why? These channels cannot even breach the 1000-subscriber mark, and it has something to do with poor engagement. 

Why the poor engagement?

Would you click the like (or even dislike) or share button if you think the YouTube video is crappy? 

Sure, you might get nasty comments calling you out for mediocre videos and that counts as an engagement.

But, they won’t subscribe to your channel. More importantly, they will share their negative opinions about your videos on their social network.

The result? No one will want to view your YouTube videos, let alone subscribe to your channel.

Please never underestimate the value of high-quality, relatable YouTube content. 

Here are some of the best ways to increase YouTube engagement through high-quality videos.

• Determine your niche or what you’re especially good at and plan your content to appeal to audiences in such a niche.

• Try to solve audiences’ problems. They are on YouTube not only for entertainment but because they demand immediate value.

• Tell a story to keep your viewers involved and emotionally invested.

• Leverage the top AI video generators to help streamline video production and ensure higher-quality YouTube content.

• Invest in high-quality video production equipment to maintain viewer interest.

You might not appreciate your video’s impact on engagement now, but it’s one of the most crucial ingredients to succeeding on YouTube.

3. Optimize Video Titles, Descriptions, and Tags

People go to YouTube for a reason, whether to entertain themselves or learn the solution to their problem. 

That’s why there is a search bar on the YouTube interface allowing users to search for topics they want to watch.

YouTube analyzes user text inputs and whips its complex algorithms to search for the best-matching video related to the query.

For example, if one types “how to convert blogs into video content with AI,” YouTube will not show “how to make videos from blogs with AI.”

Notice the difference?

YouTube will present a video with the closest match to the user query. If there’s no exact match, the next closest will be presented.

Here are some tips to help you optimize your YouTube videos for the platform’s search engine.

• Research the best keyword (read, words people use in their search), keyword variations, and broad match phrases.

• Add the target keyword to your video title and description, ensuring it sounds natural.

• Include broad and niche-specific tags to the YouTube video to boost its discoverability.

• Add a keyword-optimized SubRip Subtitle (SRT) file containing your video’s subtitles, closed captions, and time codes (it’s like a script).

• Create an attention-grabbing thumbnail for your video’s result link.

YouTube search optimization might not directly influence engagement but can help increase impressions, which, in turn, can get people to notice and interact with your video.

4. Engage Your Audience Directly

While creating compelling videos and ensuring they are discoverable by YouTube’s search bots can help you get one foot inside the winner’s circle, they aren’t enough. After all, YouTube wants to see how popular your videos can get.

So, if you want to learn how to increase YouTube engagement, heed this advice (or, shall we say, several tips?).

• Go the extra mile responding to every comment, regardless of how mean they might be. Avoid picking comments you like. Everyone puts an effort to leave feedback on your video, so you will want to return the favor.

• Plan and develop your videos so they end with questions that will encourage viewers to leave a comment.

• Offer prizes (or rewards) for likes, shares, and comments. For example, you could give away a free autographed t-shirt to the first 100 viewers who will share your video with their social circle.

• Create polls on relevant topics to get viewers to participate. For instance, you could encourage them to vote for their favorite YouTuber.

• Share lightweight updates on the YouTube Community, like posting on X or Facebook.

You will want to engage viewers promptly, too.

Although you can automate responses to help ease the burden of going through each comment and crafting the right response, we recommend exerting effort to read them yourself and reply uniquely.

5. Encourage Subscriptions and Notifications

Who wouldn’t like to have MrBeast’s 332 million subscribers, T-Series’ 279 million, or CoComelon’s 186 million?

Did you know subscribers are more likely to engage with your YouTube videos than casual viewers or non-subscribers?

That’s true!

Subscribers often activate their notification settings to ensure they won’t miss any new uploads on your channel.

Well, that is if you can convince them to subscribe. Here’s how.

• Ensure your videos are valuable (read, viewers consider it essential)

• Politely ask viewers to subscribe to your YouTube channel at the beginning, middle, or end of your videos,

• Plan your videos so that the last 20 seconds contain a subscription button and video suggestions (from your channel, of course).

• Incentivize subscribers by offering exclusive content, such as behind-the-scenes clips, early access to not-yet-published videos, and premium-quality content.

Remember, the more subscribers your YouTube channel has, the more monetization opportunities you will get, such as channel memberships, YouTube Premium subscription fee percentage, Super Stickers, Super Chats, Super Thanks, and merchandise.

6. Leverage Playlists and Series

Who doesn’t love a series – stories with overarching themes best viewed together? 

Equally surprising are YouTube playlists, which are nearly identical to a series, except they feature standalone videos but share a theme or preference.

So, how can playlists and series videos improve engagement?

Think about it. These videos will keep viewers on your channel longer, boosting watch time and engagement.

But how do you leverage YouTube series and playlists? Here are some tips.

• Organize your YouTube videos by themes or categories, like reviews, how-tos or tutorials, and vlogs.

• Enable auto-play in your videos to keep viewers engaged.

• Promote your playlists in community posts, video descriptions, and other social media platforms.

While playlists and series videos can boost engagement, they are only effective with high-quality content.

7. Collaborate with Other Creators

This tactic works best with YouTube channels with significant followers or subscribers because successful YouTubers would only collaborate with equally successful creators.

It’s an effective technique for boosting views by combining you and the other YouTuber’s clout, leading to an increase in engagement.

Here are some suggestions.

• Invite or feature guest creators in your YouTube videos. A classic example is Uncle Roger’s guest appearance on Guga Foods.

• Experiment with a joint project where you can work with other creators to create a video series.

• Give each other shoutouts in your respective videos and social media posts.

The idea is to leverage each other’s followers, giving you more chances of boosting engagement.

Final Thoughts

Boosting views, shares, and likes on YouTube is easy, with a clear blueprint to guide your viewer engagement strategy.

Understanding the importance of audience engagement to your YouTube channel’s success is crucial because it sets the tone for everything else.

Besides producing high-quality, valuable content, search optimization, direct audience engagement, encouraging subscriptions, leveraging playlists, and creator collaboration can give your YouTube channel the much-needed boost.