see this right here that means that people quit watching your video as soon as they clicked play how terrible does a video need to be for people to leave that fast your video isn't that bad is it let's fix that so the first step to improving your audience retention is actually going to start with your title and your thumbnail what we really want to do is create some kind of intrigue or some kind of curiosity so that we can get the viewer expecting something when they click into the video and the main question to ask
yourself is what is intriguing to my audience so here's an example i'm a musician i've been playing the guitar since i was about 12 years old it's my favorite thing in the world i love it i still remember back then i was helping my brother clean his room and we found this little scratched up jimi hendrix cd and so i popped it into my little cd player and it just absolutely blew my mind and i said i want to do that so knowing that if i were to go open up the youtube homepage right now
and i saw one video that was titled advanced guitar tutorial on the pentatonic scale and right next to it was another video titled how to shred like jimi hendrix in five minutes or less which one do you think i'm clicking on it's all about creating what's intriguing to your target audience so now that we got the viewer to click into our video we need to hook the viewer in those first few precious seconds the biggest mistake that we want to avoid is opening the video by just repeating what you said in the title so instead
we either just want to get right into the content or if you presented some kind of question or some kind of intrigue where the viewer may be feeling some sort of tension that they need to get resolved try to stretch that intrigue a little bit further in those opening seconds to make them feel even more tension like they need to stick around to get that tension resolved ultimately the goal of these first few seconds is to make the viewer feel like they're in the right place and also that the time investment that they made by
clicking into the video is going to be worth it think of any good tv show that you like they hook you in right off the bat and so we're trying to do the same thing with our viewers we're trying to really pull them into our content so now that we've successfully hooked the viewer into our content one of the most powerful things that we can do to continue to improve our audience retention is going to be storytelling integrating a story structure makes it way more compelling for the viewer to want to stick around and watch
the entire video verse skipping ahead just trying to find the thing that they clicked for or abandoning the video completely just watch any mr beast video jimmy is a master at storytelling and he starts just about every one of his videos with that storytelling structure who is the character what do they want why can't they have what they want and what is at stake if they don't get what they want weaving in your own personal story into your content is also another really powerful way to increase audience retention i told you a story just a
minute ago about how i got started playing the guitar and that took me what 20 seconds and i'm willing to bet that you probably felt a little bit more connected with me stories are so powerful because they create an emotional connection with the viewer and emotions hold attention and they also increase engagement now as we're approaching the end of our video keep on delivering that value to the end and don't fall into the trap of using ending language so you don't want to say hey thanks so much for checking out this video my name has
been sam don't forget to leave me a comment because this very clearly communicates to the viewer that there is no more value to be gained through the rest of this video and you can safely be on your way so instead of closing with this ending language we are going to point to another video this not only improves your audience retention but getting somebody into that next video extends the viewing session which is a very very positive viewer signal for the youtube algorithm and this makes it way more likely that youtube is going to surface your
video to more and more people out there leading to that explosive growth for your channel so ingrid actually breaks down more of these viewer signals and unpacks the youtube algorithm here so you definitely want to check out this video next so you can learn how to get the most out of your channel so go ahead and click right here and we will see you there
