Free ways to support your dancer friend's YouTube channel - current best practices

YouTube is a great platform for artists at all levels: beginners, amateurs, and aspiring professionals and more. Especially in these challenging times of the coronavirus (COVID-19), it’s more important than ever to utilize social media to strengthen our relationships with others, especially aspiring artists, musicians, and dancers. In this article, I’m going to describe the easiest free steps you can take to help support your dance friends by strengthening their digital presence on YouTube.

Engage with their YouTube content

The most valuable thing you can do for your friend is to help them get higher in the YouTube search algorithm. In other words, you want to make it so that whenever someone searches for their name or their videos using YouTube, your friend pops up higher on the search results list. The best place is number one on the results - the higher the rank your friend appears, the more likely it is for someone to click on their video, increasing their exposure. But, how can you, sitting at your computer at home, help to make this happen?

The simplest way is to engage with their content. The best part? Content engagement is literally free. It’s actually very easy and takes very little time.

Watch their videos to the end, like their YouTube video, subscribe to their content, leave comments, and add their video to playlists that you create. Even a comment as small as “Love it!” or “Dope choreography” is seen by the YouTube algorithm as an engagement. The YouTube algorithm ranks videos that are heavily engaged with as being more impactful and therefore will appear higher on search results pages. It costs you nothing to help your friends!

Don’t trade sub for sub

This is one of the most common and harmful misconceptions about the way YouTube works. People believe that having several subscribers is a measure of internet success. But the YouTube algorithm is both mysterious and vengeful - they hate it when people try to beat their system.

You might think that setting up your friend’s accounts for a “sub for sub”, or “Sub4sub” plan is helpful to them. These sub for sub sites can be found everywhere: on Facebook channels, Reddit, or Instagram. The idea is that these content creators will promise to subscribe to your channel, and in return, they expect that you follow their channel as well. Yes, most of the time, these strangers will faithfully conduct the terms of sub4sub. But most of the time, as soon as they receive notification that you have subscribed to their channel, they quickly unsubscribe.

So this sounds great - your friend gets a bunch of subscribers to their channels, right?

The unfortunate truth is that sub for sub is harmful to your friend’s digital presence. Most of the time, these people who have subscribed don’t care about your friend’s latest popping video or break dance tutorial. They just want the numbers.

YouTube is able to note which channels are actually successful, and which ones only appear successful. Participation in sub4sub only makes the channel appear successful. A high number of subscribers with a low number of engagements or clicks is a bad look for the videos, and the algorithm specifically punishes those channels by making them appear lower on the search results list. In other words, you can’t cheat YouTube, and by engaging in sub for sub, you are actually hurting your friend’s YouTube channel.

With these simple tips, you can help your friends grow their digital presence for free from the comfort and safety of your own home. Now go out there and support your friends!