If you’re a YouTube content creator, knowing your audience is key for driving success. Knowing who your fans are, where they live, what they like, and how they engage with your video content on YouTube is vital for optimizing your videos for maximum impact and engagement.
However, YouTube can be pretty stingy with its data. All of the data that the site collects about your fans belongs to YouTube, not to you. YouTube might share some general information, but the really juicy bits of data they keep for themselves… or the massive data aggregators and advertising companies who pay top dollar for the info.
It’s about time that you got a transparent look into your fan data. Thankfully, there’s a way that you can accomplish this: use a white-labeled personal app for your fanbase.
Getting to know your fans
Get to know all about your fans by moving them over to your own personal white-labeled mobile phone app. Unlike the YouTube platform, all of the data collected by the app is owned by you—so you have free access to do with your data what you will.
Some of the data that you can collect on your own personalized app includes:
- Where Fans Live. YouTube might tell you which country your fans are from, but not which city or state. There’s a world of difference between knowing that you have fans “in the U.S.” and knowing you have 1,000 fans in New York, and 1 million fans in Florida.
- When Fans Are Accessing Your Videos. In show business, timing is everything. For many YouTube videos, the first few days are when engagement will be the highest. To take full advantage of this, it’s important to know when your fans will be on YouTube to watch your videos. If you can get a video out when the majority of your fans are online to see the “new video from…” notification, you’ll get much more impact from that video faster.
- Fan Demographics. YouTube provides some broad demographics about viewer age, but it doesn’t provide much beyond that. With your own white-label app, you can collect as much data as you want about your fans, giving you a clearer picture of who they are.
Knowing this kind of information allows you to create much more targeted videos or even plan special events that cater to your fanbase.
For example, knowing where the majority of your fans live allows you to plan out your appearances so you can engage the largest possible percentage of your fans directly. So, if you have 1 million fans in Florida and only 1,000 or so in New York, you know that events in Florida will have more of an impact with your fanbase than events in New York would.
Additionally, since you own the fan data collected by your white-label app, you can retain this data for your personal—you don’t have to worry about your YouTube account getting taken down and losing all of your hard-earned data.
Building a better platform for your fans
Of course, to be effective, your white-label app needs to be well-designed—your fans aren’t going to use an app if it’s a clunky, hard-to-use mess that makes YouTube’s mobile app look good.
So, the overall design of the app should make it easy for your fans to use on their mobile devices—whether they’re on a small-sized screen or a plus-sized one.
Additionally, you’ll want to have systems in place for collecting data on your fans in the app—both discrete and overt. A notification should be included for when the app is first launched telling users that you will be collecting this data for your own purposes.
Some examples of data that can be collected discretely include:
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access location;
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access time;
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how long videos streamed via the app were watched;
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which pieces of content in the app were accessed; and
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how many times a day the app was opened.
This gives you some idea of how your fans are interacting with the app and what kind of content they like the most. Knowing this can help you know what types of content will get the most engagement with your fans—which tells you what kind of content to focus on to maximize fan engagement.
When considering how to collect more detailed demographic data about your fans, consider how much data you want to gather all at once. One way to collect data is to have fans fill out a subscription form in the app to create a “free” subscriber account with basic data such as name, email address, phone #, and other key info.
Keeping the form fields for the subscription submission few in number gets more fans to fill it out, even if you’re not getting as much info up front. Too many form fields might get you a lot of data per subscription, but not as many people are going to fill it out.
Balancing quality and amount of information against number of submissions is a delicate balancing act for many YouTubers who want to use a white-label app to manage their fans and collect data.
However, you don’t have to do it all by yourself. FanHero has helped many celebrities and YouTube content creators build their own personal apps to collect fan data—such as YouTube personality Felipe Neto.
Get your own white-label app to gather data and enact whole new monetization strategies above and beyond what YouTube offers right now!
