In this week’s episode of YouTube Success Podcast, we'll reflect on my experiences with the Shorts Challenge, and I’ll share some valuable insights and a secret tip that has me really pumped. We'll also touch on the challenges and explore how Shorts is making waves across different platforms. Plus, I'll reveal some surprising growth stats for the podcast. This is all about a positive journey through Shorts, analytics, and the ongoing experiment to make our content even better.

Episode Highlights

• Podcast growth
• Shorts Challenge
• Personal experience on Shorts Challenge
• Challenges
• Shorts Challenge stats
• Shorts’ impact on different platforms
• Facebook Reels

Join YouTube Community

Join our YouTube Community and share your experiences, insights, and questions. We'd love to connect with you as we all navigate the exciting world of video content creation together.

Links

• Shorts Challenge
• YouTube Community
• TubeFest
• KOV Links

Well, hello there YouTube Success podcast, welcome to another episode.

We're talking about a couple of things here.

Largely, we're going to talk about Shorts, but I just wanted to say

if you're watching on YouTube, what do you think to my new setup?

I assume you've not seen this new setup, but you may have.

I may have talked about it before as well I just forget all the time what

i'm talking about on this podcast.

But the way I see it is, if you come into a podcast at a different episode,

you may not have heard it already, so I may as well just repeat myself

over, and over, and over again.

Sorry for those of you that have listened to all the episodes and

you're like, Matt, you're talking about the same stuff all the time.

Well, I may have talked about the Shorts Challenge before in an

episode and it was probably a little bit of a promo to say, hey, go to

shortschallenge.co.uk and you can get involved in the 28-Day Shorts Challenge.

But what I wanted to do today is talk a little bit about the effect Shorts has

had on all the platforms and I wanted to give you a little bit of a secret

tip and a hack that I found recently so I'm really excited about that.

I'm going to tell you about that later on.

But before we get into that and before we talk about Shorts, I just wanted to

talk to you about the podcast in general.

Right now, we're sitting on about 1500 downloads of the podcast since

we started, and one thing that's, one thing's happening that firstly, I'm

really grateful for, but also I was a bit surprised about and the thing that's

happening is the more people I talk to, the more people that come towards me from

whether they connect to me on Instagram or on Facebook, or they join in groups

that I've got, or I've got a membership, a little group membership for business

owners, the more people I talk to, the more they're saying Matt, I listened

to your podcast this week, or I've been binge, binge watching, binge listening.

I don't know what the term is your podcast and I just I'm just delighted

and I'm so grateful and appreciative of those of you that are coming and you're

listening to the episodes and you're paying attention and you're consuming

all the things because your desire to start or to grow your channel is deep

rooted and you're like, this is it.

I'm going to do this this year.

And you're coming and you're consuming this stuff and I really appreciate it.

What I will ask you though is if you do like it, please go to whatever

platform you're on and leave like a comment, a little note to say,

review, you know, really like it.

Remember I said in the last episode, I think it was the last one or the

one before, leave a five star rating, five out of five or 10 out of 10.

If you, depending on the platform, I assume they're all five out of five.

I just don't know.

I just don't know.

But if you could, or share it with a friend, you know, share this with someone.

Um that you think would be interested in this stuff as well.

So that's it, but I didn't expect that effect of a podcast.

I just wanted to do it to be consistent I wanted to be able to have a another kind

of video published on my YouTube channel, something that would keep me, keep the

momentum going and keep me consistent and that's this has really done that, which

leads nicely into the Shorts Challenge as well, because what we did with the Shorts

Challenge is, we started it on Monday the 8th of January and we're about a week in.

To be honest with you, I've not been majorly consistent with it.

I just like the group of people are doing that challenge.

I have found it difficult even to do a 1-minute video.

Can you believe a 1-minute video is difficult to do every day?

I've not done much planning, all of that kind of stuff.

So of course I've fell into some pitfalls.

But this is not a negative episode.

This is a positive episode.

Because I wanted to tell you about some of the positive things that have happened.

The first thing is, I did 5, I think 5 or 6 days in a row consistently.

And then I looked at the stats across the platforms.

And now this is not going to be mind blowing.

You're not going to be like, Oh my god, Matt, you're so viral.

You're so viral with your 2500 views.

You're not going to be like that.

But the way I see it, and the way I lead my life as a YouTuber, as a video expert,

as a business owner is, when you see those people that have got a million

subscribers, or 100,000 subscribers, they didn't get there overnight.

There's unicorns of course, there's some of them that happen to publish,

somebody told me yesterday about a guy that's got 14 videos and he's

on almost a million subscribers.

Of course there's times where you can blow up and I do call them unicorns

and you know, because it's so unlikely.

And I think you can prep as much as you like, but if you said to somebody, I've

got a video and I know it's going to go viral, I think you're probably lying.

There's no way you can know.

And even as goes as far as to say Mr.

Beast couldn't say that the problem that the advantage he has is he already

has a whole view of, a whole brand equity is built up of viewers that

will consume anything he puts out, whereas he didn't have at the start

and you won't have at the start either.

So, when I'm sharing this stuff and I'm sharing the results, don't sit there

and go these numbers are pants, kind of prefacing all of this to kind of

say, please don't tell me the numbers are crap, , because I'm looking for

percentages of growth and I'm looking for what positive impact does it have and what

can I learn from this to do next time?

Okay.

How can we improve?

All YouTubers that are sensible, that are anywhere on their journey will

always say if you can just improve by 1%, by one point even, from this

video to the next or from this piece of consistency to the next, you will

get there in the end, all right.

And the end might be two years.

It might be five years.

It might be six months if you're super super lucky, maybe strategically lucky.

Okay.

So what happened then?

So I published five videos, one of fever and I published

them across all the platforms.

Now, if I go and take a look in YouTube, I'll go and look right now.

And we'll just take a look at some of the impacts of this.

And like I say, the numbers are not amazing, but I want to

give you some context about it.

So.

for the most part, a lot of the videos I did didn't really land very well at all.

They got into the first, what is like the first test that each of the

platforms do, and they said, okay, we've tested it with 300 odd people.

It's not got viral potential and so we're not gonna test it into the next group.

So if you don't know how it works, they test you in a small group,

maybe a thousand people, see how it's working, passes that test and more

people watch it or then put you in a group of people that 1000 to 50,000

and then after that, 50,000 to 100,000, 200,000 to 1,000,000, and so on, so on.

So they test you first.

So if you're stuck in sort of the 500 or less views range, it's

because you can consider that your video didn't pass the test.

The algorithm tested it And the test failed they said, no actually this is

not got the potential that we think it has, which is okay because actually

during that test, you can still pick up views and you can still pick up

subscribers and all of that good stuff.

So there's a guarantee that they will test it.

Now if you're 700 views, it might be that it's even not been tested yet

or there's something else going on.

It's very unlikely that you'll get anything less than a

couple of a hundred views.

So if I take a look at my analytics for the last 7 days, shall we make

this a bit more interactive to show..

Oh, it's just dropped off now, because it's just gone over 7 days, so the

stats are even less than they were.

Can I do a custom range here?

Let's do the last 10 days then.

I definitely started on the 8th, we know this.

And so we'll go from the 7th to the 17th, to today.

I can't show you, so I'm gonna just talk you through it.

So new viewers, this is people that have never seen any of my content before.

When I started doing the Shorts during that period of

time, I had 1800 new viewers.

Now, if you think about this and this is with the Shorts, we had a

thousand with the long form content as well, which presumably is the

podcast that we're putting out.

So we had 1,800 new viewers now the way I described it to someone

yesterday as I said, imagine you could go and speak in front of 1,800 people

an event like you'd be amazed by speaking in front of it 1,800 people.

That's 1,800 new viewers and then we had returning viewers, so

there's about 352 returning viewers.

So this is probably subscribers, it's probably people I'm connected

with that have not subscribed yet but they've probably watched Consumer

Review quite a bit of my content.

And so the total views was 2,500 and I got a couple, just 2 or

3 extra subscribers, right.

So the numbers are really low.

But this is five minutes, five, yeah, five minutes of content across five days.

So one minute of content across five days.

To me, that feels really encouraging.

That feels to me like my test for the Shorts Challenge has

resulted in some positivity.

Now if I take a look across this, across the other platforms as well, and if I take

a look across Instagram, and if I take a look on TikTok, I'll also find that I've

had this similar sort of impact as well.

So let's focus on Instagram reels first.

I had 5 videos that I posted, and these are the numbers

from oldest to newest, right?

91 views, 118 views, 297 views, 80 views, 59 views.

So I'd say they probably didn't work very well on Instagram.

I wonder if the audience is different on Instagram.

I've still got 1000 followers on Instagram.

So they're people that know me.

There'd be a plenty of people there that would have seen that

they would have known me but they didn't work very well those videos.

So we need to tweak the style of video I think for Instagram.

Now if you look at TikTok, with those same videos in the same order,

it was 506, 380, 316, 347, 357.

So I'd say that TikTok is probably giving me a bigger test audience to show that to.

Again, it didn't think the videos were worthy of being viral or getting more

viewers beyond the first thousand.

But at least it tried with a couple of hundred people.

So again, just need to tweak the content.

We need to try and find a better hooks or do something different to improve that.

It's also saying to me, now, this is an interesting thing

because I'm aiming for a minute.

Potentially, TikTok is moving beyond the 1-minute point because it's telling me

there, try videos longer than 1 minute.

Viewers spend 90% more time watching longer videos, 90% more time.

So is it now that TikTok is saying, actually we want longer videos.

So, how can I build that into my strategy when I really want to do

1-minute videos for YouTube Shorts?

Okay?

Interesting point I think but then what's really interesting, the most interesting

thing about all of this, when I was testing this, it's Facebook Reels, because

I didn't know Facebook Reels existed.

I thought, when I published to Instagram, it would publish to my Facebook

Reels as well, or Story, or whatever.

I wasn't really sure about it.

So, and somebody had mentioned to me, I think it was Austin, one of our

speakers at Tubefest, Austin Armstrong.

He said to me a little while ago, he said, Matt Facebook Reels are killing

it like if you put content on Facebook, they're really paying attention to that.

They're really doubling down on that.

So if you were going to do anything you should do those and of course, I just

ignored him like all people I ignore with this good advice and just ignored

him and did what I wanted anyway.

But here's the results and I only posted 3 videos and I didn't even though really

that I did it that way and it's so I didn't really put any effort into it

as well so I don't think I did that.

I wonder if I can see.

There's no real cover photo there.

That's got they have got captions on them to be fair.

But if the 3 videos I had,

I had one that's 500 views, one that's 1,500 and one that's 165

and the benefit that that's had is I've had more people then start

following my profile on Facebook.

And if I'm really truly honest, the thing that I need the most, because I sell

the most on there is Facebook followers.

I need to build that audience up.

Now Austin is a great example.

Austin has 960 odd thousand people following him on Facebook, so it

should have been a good indication because he's rebuilding his Tiktok

and a few other things as well.

But it's a good indication of how much you can use facebook reels not instagram reels

facebook reels to increase your followers which then of course you can move those

followers to other platforms as well So I think in summary for all of this.

And I hope this has been useful for you, please do let me know, find me

on the socials and let me know if you've managed to watch this episode.

I think in summary that I need to continue to create Shorts content.

This is me, my self-talk now, I'm talking to myself.

Matt, you need to continue to create shorts content, I

think it's a great experiment.

I need to focus on Facebook Reels as a platform to create more of this content, I

think possibly I've got more brand equity.

Brand equity is when you first go out in the world and start a

business, nobody knows who you are, what you deliver, or whatever.

As you deliver value to people, they have goodwill for you, right?

And you start to build up some brand equity.

So I think possibly, the reason why it's working on Facebook more

is because my audience on Facebook have a couple of thousand people,

already know, like, and trust me.

The audience on YouTube doesn't really know who I am yet.

Even with a thou, what am I on?

Almost 3000 subscribers.

The people on Twitter, the people on Instagram, they

don't really know who I am yet.

They're still getting to learn that stuff, whereas I've got a

lot of brand equity on Facebook.

So it's potentially why it had that viral, viral, 1500 viral.

It's not viral, is it?

But why it had a more, a bigger audience, even though some

of those were new followers.

So I need to double down on that and I think really I just need to

continue the experiment because that's what the Shorts challenge was for me

really was an experiment, what results could I get if I was consistent?

Of course, I fell off the wagon after 5 days and I need to get back on it today.

So I'm going to start right now after this film in this episode, I'm going to

go and film another Shorts and make sure that I look at, think, and this is the

last thing I'll say on this episode is, make sure I look at what I'm consuming.

What is hooking me in and do some research.

What's hooking me in, what's interesting to me, what's keeping

me watching the videos, and try and create more content that's like that.

I love doing the list item list listicle-type content.

So the 3 best video editing tools, the 3 best cameras, the 3 best whatever.

I think they're really good when I've looked at Austin stuff Austin when I

went to social media marketing world.

He said look, just copy me, do what I'm doing because it's working.

He does listicles around AI tools, obviously AI is hot topic at the moment.

But I want to keep it around video, that's my expertise.

That's the thing that I want to get a bigger audience on so I'm going to keep

it around video, keep it around editing, content repurposing, and all that kind

of stuff and just focus on the listicles.

So again in a couple of weeks time, I'm gonna report back and I've set myself up

now because I have to come back to you and report back by the end of January.

Again, not making this at all evergreen.

Alright, thanks so much really appreciate you listening to this episode.

Don't forget to leave us a review and share it with your friends.

Alright, that's me.

Matt Hughes, King of Video.

Take care for now.

See you next time.