Why sharing your YouTube videos can hurt your channel

You might think that sharing links to your YouTube videos is a great strategy to grow your channel, but is it really?

It’s true that high engagement on your video in the first 24 hours after publishing is great.

That shows YouTube that it’s probably a good video and that it “deserves” more reach.

(In this case, “deserve” just means that YouTube sees that this video can help keep their users on the platform a little bit longer.

In the end, it’s all about data, and what matters most is not how good YOU think the video is or how long it took to edit. What matters is: Will people click the thumbnail and will people keep watching.)

Anyways, although initial traction is great, sharing links to your new video can actually hurt your channel. ☹️

How the (lack of) growth can look like when you “hype up” a video and spam people with direct links

Here’s the thing:

If a subscriber (or someone who’s watching a lot of your videos but didn’t subscribe yet) clicks one of your shared links and watches the video (either embedded on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or in the browser on their phone) then YouTube has no idea that this person/subscriber watched the video.

Why is this a problem? 🤔

Well, first of all, in order for YouTube to understand that your…