Christian Hughes from
Toddler Fun Learning shared his story of how he created a
YouTube channel that went from 0 - 750 million views!
Amazing tips shared about persistence, perseverance, and the creation of consistently good content got him to those sky-high numbers. In the early days the trade-off between distributing and sharing the content to creating the content, creation won every time. Focus on creating good, quality video content, tag it well in titles/descriptions and YouTube will do the rest.
95% of your video views will likely come from the suggested video that YouTube recommends. By creating tags and describing your video as best as you can, you'll likely be well placed for ranking in the suggestions box.
For optimising videos, the sweet spot for finding a topic to create a video depends on what Video IQ would weight, mostly a 50/50 split on competitiveness and volume seems to work the best.
Each of their videos is created in mind with their core values and offering educational themes throughout.
A +10 minute videos mean you can have mid-roll ads (Good for YT) and you can get up to £1k per 1m views. To get to this level you have to be giving value with your videos and have people engaged. Having retention less than 40% on your videos is not good and if your audience are like children, very fickle, this can be critical.
The best length of your video is the longest time you can keep an engaged audience. Align with the tags, titles, and descriptions to have people find your content and if you're thinking about starting a YT Channel and want some tips, try the following:
1. Create your idea
2. Get it down on 1 page
3. Write the script for it
4. Storyboard it if you can
5. Release it
Create a minimum of 5 videos and have the duration of each video released consistently.
The importance of the Thumbnail is paramount!
Keep going, testing and fine-tuning until you find your formula.
In the analytics section of YT can you find out where your users dropped off and where they stayed engaged. Use these insights to inform your future idea generation for videos. Do more of the same of what works and be creative and create playlists.
The current challenges of YouTube no longer being able to allow you to advertise to children. All your YouTube ads can be done via the Google Ads Platform.
The unfortunate reality that people would rather watch ads than pay for content.
Toddler Fun Learning now also have an app, which a few weeks ago, was the app of the day in the UK! This is new territory for them and if focused on being ad-free and subscription-based.
From videos to now creating audiobooks and playlists on Spotify, Amazon Prime and getting involved in a new and upcoming Spotify Kids app, it's all go for the team at Toddler Fun Learning and we wish them all the very best.
Tools To Takeaway
Table 2 - Social Media Agency
For this table, we had regular attendee James Smethurst who has had an unconventional route into running a Social Media Agency.
The Social Desk, where James is Managing Director, is an agency offering Social Media Management and related services to local businesses in and around the North West.
James shared a few stories and impressive client results and how he went about doing this. The power and importance of hashtags was a key finding that kept coming back into the conversations and knowing how and when to use them.
We talked about the right size for a hashtag, should it be over 100k in size or something smaller?
Is it better to find a niche hashtag with less traction but more engaged users?
There is no definitive answer when it comes to social media and what works, works!
We then talked about different case studies such as 'The Egg' and how Kylie Jenner made famous an egg account on Instagram and Twitter.
New ads using the likes of Waze (car traffic app) and the Geo local Facebook ads to target specific locations can be used to advertise to audiences with great effect.
An example of using an alternative platform for advertising we discussed was Pinterest. The conversation led to a previous Social Media Meetup where Milexa Group shared their Pinterest Story and how one of their pins had been repinned many times and the benefits of website traffic this brought.
We talked about LinkedIn Ads and how they can be expensive but valuable if your audience is on that channel, but be prepared to pay for it!
Tools To Takeaway
Table 3 - Digital for Churches
Peter Murden from
Digital Church Toolkit shared his story about how he spotted a huge gap and noticed that churches are not using Social Media effectively to attract volunteers, donations, support from communities when they need it most.
Peter and his friend, partnered up to create a service specifically designed to serve churches across the UK.
He recommended a few ways to create content and save time while doing it by looking at what's happening already and capture that instead of looking to create new content all the time.
If you look to create video content, it's easier to repurpose content into other formats. From one 45 minutes talk, you can get a podcast, short social videos, quote graphics, blog posts etc.
For advertising, always look to create engaging content that you can create custom audiences from and then start the ads cycle that way.
Developing the mailing list was another key consideration for Peter as he believes it's important to have this as a business asset compared to followers on social media accounts.
