On social media, your influence reaches beyond the people who follow you. Whenever your followers interact with your posts, their followers may see that activity, potentially leading more people to your profile and your content.

To capitalize on your sphere of influence outside of YouTube, you’ll need a social media strategy. How are you going to promote your videos on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.? How are you going to make sure you get your video links in front of as many eyes as possible?

Keep track of important metrics.

Social media marketing is a numbers game. As a vlogger, you know to keep an eye on your view count. However, there are several other important metrics you should be keeping track of as well.

On YouTube, you can find everything you need in your channel analytics. Your watch time, demographics, and like to dislike ratio all matter as much as your view count does. 

On other platforms, watch your number of likes, comments, and shares as much as you watch your follower count. A small, active audience is better than a large, passive one when it comes to getting more engagement and, therefore, more views.

Put more focus on the platforms where you get the most engagement.

Social media promotion is all about reaching as many people as you can in as little time as possible. Therefore, you should concentrate on the platforms where you get the most engagement instead of where you have the most followers. You could have thousands of followers, but if your post only receives a hundred likes, you aren’t reaching many potential viewers.

An easy way to measure your rate of engagement on any platform is to divide the number of likes or comments on a post by your number of followers. The result is the percentage of your followers who engaged with your post. So, say for example you had a thousand followers and got a hundred likes on your Instagram post. Dividing that hundred likes by your thousand followers means that ten percent of your followers liked your post.

You can use this formula on several of your recent posts and than average the results together to get a more general idea of how many of your followers see your posts. Repeat this exercise for every social media platform you’re active on. Then, you’ll know where to focus your efforts.

Find the times your posts get the most engagement.

There are plenty of articles on the internet that tell you when the best time to post to any given social media platform is. However, none of them can tell you exactly when your audience in particular is the most active. To find that out, you’ll have to run a little experiment.

Make a chart or calendar that divides each day into hours. Over the course of the next month, record what time you post on social media. Then, write in how much engagement that post received within its first hour.

At the end of the month, average together the numbers of likes and comments you got at certain times. The times that give you the highest resulting numbers are the times when your followers were the most active. Moving forward, make any posts promoting your YouTube videos at these times.

Planning your social media strategy comes down to knowing when and where to post. Promote your videos where you have the most engaged audience at the times they’re most active.