YouTube: Visual Storytelling & Audience Engagement
YouTube’s resource portal YouTube for Artists offers a tailored guide of practices set to help artists effectively utilise YouTube’s multi-format ecosystem. This ecosystem, including Shorts, live broadcasts, music videos and much more, provides an opportunity for artists to share not only their music, but their brand, community and visual identity.
YouTube for Artists informs artists how to impactfully build their visual identity while aligning with their audience, through campaign strategy resources, Official Artist Channel customisation tips, ‘how-to’ & masterclass videos, a YouTube Charts hub, platform news stories, and more.
Visual Storytelling
One of the top promotional strategies and integral components of a successful Official Artist Channel, currently being encouraged throughout YouTube for Artists and across YouTube’s wider team, is visual storytelling. Visual storytelling, rooted in visuals for fans that create intentional and unique content around a project’s release and build a world around the music, allows for intentional creativity to be seen and rewarded.
Music videos and visual content on YouTube are not just about views, but about how many people they can connect with. Sharing visuals on YouTube allows fans to be drawn into an artist’s creative world, and allows artists to develop and share the story of their release beyond the music. Music videos are still at the core of this on YouTube, with music video consumption still hitting record highs, with +25% year on year growth, yet YouTube for Artists detail 8 different types of ‘world building formats’ that artists should additionally consider within their YouTube storytelling strategy:
Trailers & Teasers
Visualizers
Lyric Videos
Choreography Videos
Behind The Scenes (day of the life, studio clips, etc.)
Fan Videos (feature fans content)
Performance Videos (recording sessions, live shows, etc.)
Alternative Versions (different languages, acoustic, etc.)
It’s important to note that although YouTube commonly encourages active engagement with Shorts, it is important to not prioritise short form content over music videos. Music videos create a longer lasting impact on your fan base and allow for a great source of content for your channel, including stills/BTS for Posts, fans creating Shorts using the music video, and much more. YouTube for Artists also shares the importance of sharing a music video the same day of your release, resulting in much higher subscriber growth and views in the first weeks. Even if your music video is not finalised, still share one or more of the 8 world building formats. Fans can enter an artist's world in many ways on YouTube, and YouTube for Artists foremost encourages great visual storytelling with authentic intention.
For a further breakdown of the importance of visual storytelling on YouTube, see the YouTube for Artists masterclass here.
Audience Engagement
It’s incredibly important to build a release strategy and visual world for your music that best suits your audience and maximises engagement with your campaign. In order to do so, YouTube for Artists encourages artists to keep track of the following:
What, Where & How Fans Watch: What types of videos do your fans watch - are they active watchers engaged with official music videos and performance videos, or passive who engage with content such as official audio and visualisers? Where do fans watch your content - YT Music, mobile app, desktops, etc.? How do they watch your content - do they most engage with Shorts, Videos or Live? These questions can be useful in guiding what content formats will be the most impactful for your fanbase.
Three Step Campaign Strategy: YouTube For Artists provides a breakdown of pre-release, release, and post-release strategies. Campaigns often focus on pre-release plans but post-release can be just as important - keep telling the story, get fans engaged and keep people coming back to keep them engaged. Read Absolute’s blog on the best practices for these three steps of a YouTube campaign here.
Understand Your International Audience: YouTube Analytics allows you to analyse your top international fanbases to see where in the world your fans are watching from. YouTube for Artists charts hub also allows you to explore what content is performing best across different countries, for broader platform insights. This can allow artists to know what translated titles could be useful for their fanbase, know which closed captions to review to ensure the translations are correct, and to identify what local artists could be impactful to collaborate with.
Video Collaborators: Channel collaboration has been recently rolled out for creatives and artists. This is set to help share collaborations, grow channels and let artists build upon their visual identity together. You can have up to 5 collaborators now showing their name and subscribe button when sharing a video, and can even add collaborators retroactively to past impactful and fan favourite videos.
Understand Your Catalogue: YouTube Analytics allows you to discern what videos of yours are still performing best and connecting most with your fans - you can highlight catalogue videos on your channel that might help contribute to your current campaign and visual identity.
For further resources on the best ways to build your Official Artist Channel, utilize visual storytelling within your campaigns and build your audience on YouTube, see below: