YouTube video (by James Laughlin, Feb 12, 2025) giving practical advice on growing audiences on Instagram and YouTube. Main claims: platforms are active and can still drive rapid follower growth from viral reels; hashtags are largely ineffective compared with high-quality, niche-focused content; YouTube's search capability is especially valuable for service-based businesses because searchable how-to videos can generate steady traffic.
Chapters
Instagram, YouTube. Are they dead? Certainly not. In fact, they're probably more alive than they ever have been. You could have a reel pop off that gets a million views and then brings in 10,000 new followers from one piece of content. And you can get that going a few times a month and all of a sudden you're growing 10, 20,000 followers in a month and you're getting millions and millions of views on your content. You never had that back then. Hashtags strategy for content itself and creating that. What's working right now? So firstly, I'll say don't even worry about hashtags. Like hashtags pretty much do nothing. It's just content above anything, getting really dialed in on how you can make the best content in that niche in the world so that people want to follow you, so that people want to engage with your stuff. So One thing that YouTube has that other platforms don't have is that search function. So you can create a video that might be, you know, how to do something that people, it might not take off in. The YouTube algorithm might not get recommended on everyone's feeds, but when someone searches like, how do I do this? Your video pops up, they click on it, they watch it, and you can get traffic from that. If you're not doing YouTube, especially for service based businesses, you're missing out on so much.
