VideoHerd
How Often Should I Post On My B2B YouTube Channel?
Category: Content Scheduling
How Often Should I Post Videos to my B2B YouTube Channel?
Many organizations struggle to find a good rhythm with their YouTube upload schedule. Often, companies treat their YouTube channels like Twitter, posting multiple videos daily without any strategy, or like Vimeo, where they post three times a year and expect magic to happen.
While both methods have solid intentions, posting without a content strategy will negatively affect your channel. The YouTube algorithm is designed to award content that retains attention and reject content that doesn’t. YouTube is also not just a video-sharing platform; it’s a search engine as well. Marketing and management teams don’t fully understand this. They become frustrated with the performance of their YouTube efforts when their videos don’t work as well as the marketing gurus they’ve been listening to promised. But if this sounds like you, don’t worry. It’s quite simply a misunderstanding of how the platform works.
In this article, we’ll show you what elements of your YouTube strategy you need to look at to determine when and what you should post to grow your B2B channel organically.
First, Find Out Your YouTube Marketing Goals
To know when you should post on your B2B YouTube channel, you must get clear on your marketing goals. Finding these goals sets the stage for your content strategy, the type of content people will expect from you, how long each video will take to create, and how often you should upload. Suffice to say, this is why we put it at the top of the list.
For example:
If your goal is to gain ten leads a month through YouTube traffic within 90 days of YouTubing, to get there, you would need to create some seriously valuable content that drives people to landing pages instead of just re-uploading your company’s zoom webinars.
As we see in this goal example, when YouTubing for a lead generation goal, you will immediately know each video will require a lead magnet, landing pages, extra editing, and even time to film your colleagues or boss. This goal alone shows you and your team that posting once or twice daily is unrealistic and out of the picture unless you have a massive production team, which is also rare and even unnecessary. Instead, uploading one well-thought video weekly would be a better way to reach this goal.
After those 90-days are over, you can reflect on your progress, and depending if you make your number or not, you can change your video upload number and try again. One thing is clear: Determining your goal will start shaping your upload number.
Understand which YouTube Algorithm You’re Targeting
Throw away all your notions about more posts = more traction. On YouTube, it’s not that simple. Instead, before anyone tries to come at you with a content calendar filled with numerous posts a week, you should sit down with them and tell them how the YouTube algorithm works. Use this to steer your upload decisions. On YouTube, there are two main algorithms.
Search Algorithm
Works to serve tailored video results to users after they’ve typed in a query in YouTube’s search box. Its main goal is to match the query with the most relevant content.
Discovery Algorithm
Works to show refined content on people’s suggested videos, shorts, trending, subscriptions, and notifications. Its main goal is to keep people watching on the platform as long as possible.
Depending on the algorithm you wish to appear in, it will dictate your content strategy and help narrow down how often you should post. With Search targeted content, you can create it with less production value and make it faster. However, it’s harder to digest than Discovery-based content, which focuses on entertainment. Depending on your goal, a strategy in place that puts a balance between Search and Discovery of targeted content is critical.
Furthermore, you could be okay posting more than once a week with Discovery-targeted videos. However, for others, it’s not an excellent strategy for B2B YouTube channels unless your audience is seriously asking for it.
As we can see here:
a B2B channel we’re working on shows over 50% of the views come from YouTube’s search feature.
Start Looking Into Your Viewer's Watching Habits
If you’re posting B2B-themed videos, the best time to post would likely be in the morning or at lunchtime during your audience’s working days. However, each industry is different, and viewing habits vary from person to person. That being said, picking a day and time is like a roulette wheel when first starting your B2B channel.
If you have statistics to work off of, we highly recommend you upload during your highest times. But if not, don’t worry too much. It’s important to just get your content out there in the beginning. Organic YouTube content is evergreen. Meaning each video’s traffic can snowball over time. And, with business videos, it often takes a couple of months to kick in and start gaining viewers and traction on your content. Overall, for B2B YouTube channels, we recommend posting between 10:00 AM and 8:00 PM during working days.
Here is a look at one of our 1000+ subscriber Business to Business YouTube channels we helped grow from scratch:
We can see viewers are on YouTube on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday after lunch. However, posting before lunch won’t matter too much because if your videos get high click-through rates and watch times, the algorithm will show them in your subscribers' and like-minded viewers' feeds. This can change for every channel. For example, you could be in a niche where people only have time to watch on the weekends. In this case, you would change your strategy to post maybe once or twice if possible.
Furthermore, even though three days look great for posting your video, we still wouldn’t recommend it. This is because you may lower the quality of your other videos to post more, hurting your brand’s channel more than helping. The goal of the game here is quality over quantity. So when you look at your active viewer chart, we would suggest picking your highest day and posting then.
Release Videos Alongside Email Blasts, Blog, and Social Media Posts
YouTube videos ideally should be released when you can cross-promote them with other digital marketing channels. When your other marketing teams have content ready, it’s essential to communicate with them to release your content simultaneously to tap into your combined reach. This will increase your ‘view velocity’, which is how many views your video gets in the first 1 to 24 hours since uploaded. The higher this is, the better your chance of getting the ball rolling on your newest upload. It also signals to the algorithm that people are interested in your video and to promote it more frequently across YouTube.
A great example could be linking to your newest upload in your monthly email newsletter or embedding your video in a blog post that is Tweeted out. Either way, telling your marketing team when you have a YouTube video ready is good practice, as each platform can promote it further. While not one-hundred percent a deciding factor on when you should post your video, having other promotional materials ready to advertise it alongside your upload will greatly help when you should upload that video.
If we take anything away from this, you should be uploading strategically over uploading as much as possible for the best results. Take collaborating your social media releases into account for the best results on your B2B YouTube channel.
See How Often Your Niche’s Competition Are Uploading
As we briefly discussed, each industry has people searching and viewing YouTube videos on related topics at different times. Their behaviors can range from occasionally digesting content once a week to tuning in daily. To check the temperature of what is working and what isn’t in your area of expertise, we recommend you research how often your competition is uploading. Take the time to find 6 to 8 channels similar to yours and calculate the average time they release a new upload. Then, see which channel is growing the fastest and has the highest engagement on each video. The competitors who are steadily growing with their YouTube marketing are the ones you should model your upload schedule after. A little recon on your competitors will highlight how often viewers in your niche would like to see content, giving you an expectation of how many videos you should create per week.
Check Your Engagement Rates
Another factor for figuring out how often you should upload is your engagement rate. The engagement rate is the biggest outlier for your video upload frequency because it measures how connected your audience is to your channel.
Again, a high engagement rate tells us that whatever is on camera is doing a great job of relating and connecting to the viewer. This suggests that the channel can post more frequently if it continues what it’s doing without the worry of fatiguing it’s viewers with more uploads.
Sidenote - read how to not fatigue you're viewers here:
The engagement rate is calculated by adding the number of likes and comments and dividing it by the total number of views. When this rate is exceptionally high, your viewers love what you’re doing.
We find this is the only time you can consider posting daily or over 3x a week for a B2B YouTube channel. And, as lovely as it sounds, it is exceptionally rare.
Video Upload Frequency Conclusion
In conclusion, we suggest uploading 1 to 2 of your highest-quality videos per week for new B2B YouTube channels. Any more than this, you better have a high engagement rate to justify it. Otherwise, you’ll risk burning out your viewership and wasting internal resources on creating lower-quality videos that will end up not being ranked as high in the algorithm. Causing you to miss out on some serious opportunities if your goal is in lead generation.
If you’re looking for help reforming your YouTube strategy, we can help. At VideoHerd, we help companies grow their B2B YouTube channels so they make YouTube Marketing hit their goals.
If you’re looking to turn around your channel, feel free to to schedule a free zero-obligation B2B YouTube channel consulting call.
