Go Viral with Shorts New Features — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:00] YouTube just released a massive update for YouTube Shorts, and quite frankly, this might be the biggest update that we've ever seen, and it's made going viral so much easier for small channels on YouTube. In fact, it's helped this channel go viral, this channel go viral, and if you implement the changes I share with you in this video without skipping any of them and begin to take advantage of these new settings and these new features, it's going to help you go viral, too.

[00:20] Change number one is you need to make sure that you're using the Audience Trends platform that YouTube gives you the right way, because if you're not using this correctly, then you're not going to get the views that you want. I got a bunch of different comments on my last video asking me to explain this a little bit more in depth.

[00:33] So here we go. Okay, so here's exactly what I'm talking about. If you now come over in your analytics on Studio, we come over into Trends right here. We're going to be able to get ideas for your next video. But really what this is going to allow you to see is, one, whether or not YouTube wants to push out the content that you're going to be creating.

[00:49] And two, it's actually going to allow you to see the best links for you to be posting content. So a few things that I didn't cover in my last video that I do want to cover in this video. What people are looking for right here. This is good, and it is something that you should be paying attention to,

[01:02] but if you look at this like trustworthy, online-controlled experiments, that has nothing to do with what I'm posting. We could come over here, and we could actually click not interested, and it'll remove that. And I would suggest that you do that, because then it's actually going to make these

[01:15] what people are looking for more advanced and better for you. So just looking at this, I can see agents and artificial intelligence. I think that that's good. Ultimate Google sites, I think that's fine. The 2025 is kind of concerning here. AI tools for financial analysis. That one also looks good, but the recipes are kind of irrelevant.

[01:31] So I wouldn't just go blindly based off of these. You want to apply your own, hey, does this actually look like this makes sense? In addition to that, new videos to inspire you under here. A lot of these do make a lot of sense. In fact, this video right here is really good for me. This one right

[01:46] here is another one that could be good. This one's good. This one's good. This one's good. So about half of these videos are relevant. But really, these aren't the most important tools under trends right here. What's even more important is, let's say that we look something up like Claude Opus 5,

[02:00] which is actually something that I'm going to end up making a video about. We could see that this says medium interest right here. Ideally, what you want is for that to say high or even better than that. Like if we come over here to Chai Shibugi 5.6, we could see that this is going to show very

[02:13] high. Or if we come over here and type in something like Google Gemini, this is also probably should show kind of high. This is too broad of a search right here, but if we kind of narrow this down right here, Gemini 3.6, we see very high. So basically, that's what you're looking for. You

[02:28] then get shown the top searches under these topics. These are the types of things that you're going to want to be putting in your description. You're going to want to put these inside of your tags, because this is really going to be the metadata that helps you get more views on YouTube. And

[02:40] then essentially what you should be doing is clicking on show all right here, and this is going to allow you to see what kind of content is really doing well. We can see right here that these are three shorts and basically what this shows us is that a shorter short, 16

[02:53] seconds, is way better than something that is almost two minutes long or something that is one minute long. So basically, this is going to let you know two things. One what the length is for the videos that you should be creating on YouTube and two you want to make sure that this has very high interest high interest or something along the lines of that You want to avoid anything that is low interest or that doesn show interest because that means that it too broad And this is all going to be different depending on what channel you actually look at this on

[03:19] Change number two is that YouTube has now completely changed what kind of analytics and what kind of data you need to be using in order to inform how you should actually get more views on YouTube Shorts. And I know those words might be confusing and it might sound complex, but I'm going to break this down as simply as humanly possible.

[03:33] Okay, so the first of these changes is you want to make sure that you're coming over here. If we come back over into Seymour right here, under segments, you want to go subscribers and non-subscribers. So we can see right here that my subscribers stay to watch more frequently.

[03:47] My average view duration on them is higher, and my average percentage viewed on them is higher. So that means that my subscribers are not hurting my particular content on this particular channel, particularly this type of content. You might notice a difference between different topics, between different channels, between different audiences.

[04:03] Now, let's say that this was flopped, and actually that my subscribers, all the numbers were way lower than not subscribed. Now, what I would have wanted to do is I would have wanted to come over into details right here. When I was uploading my video, and if we scroll down, this is going to be under the tag setting right here.

[04:19] We're going to see publish in subscription feed and notify subscribers. This is checked. I can't uncheck this because I've already published this video. But if this video had not been published yet, hint, hint, you would want to uncheck this if your subscribers were hurting your views.

[04:32] and then it wouldn't actually show that content to the subscribers, and you wouldn't get dinged for that, and you wouldn't get that negativity. Now, the next thing you need to pay attention to is the languages right here, because if we come in here, we could see this video got processed in all these different languages.

[04:46] We have the audio getting changed, and we have the title and description getting changed. I didn't choose any of these. YouTube automatically does this. Now, if we actually come over into the analytics in the video, what we might actually notice is that we could come over here,

[04:58] and inside of Breakdown, we could go by Geography, and you might see that a specific geography is actually lowering your reach. For example, I can see here, Nigeria is actually helping me out because the average reiteration is high,

[05:10] but with India, the average reiteration is the lowest. Well, guess what? That was one of those languages, Hindi, that YouTube is translating my stuff to, so I might want to turn that off in order to help this video get more views, because then it won't have this low average reiteration skewing things.

[05:24] And you want to make sure that you're going through and you're actually analyzing this for different topics, different videos, and actually see whether or not there are other countries that are hurting your reach. If they are, make sure you turn those off.

[05:36] Now, change number three is YouTube has now finally released a brand new update that allows you to choose, allows you to change, allows you to download, allows you to upload different thumbnails for YouTube Shorts, and this could be your big break that can actually help you go viral.

[05:49] Now, a new setting and feature is going to be found over here. So now when we're inside of Details on a YouTube Short right here, we can actually come over here, and if we click on these three options, we can see that we can change this, we can download this, and we can select this from a video.

[06:01] If we click on select video, this is then going to show us a bunch of different screens here that we can actually choose a thumbnail from, but really what you should be doing is you should be coming over here and you should be changing this. If we click on this, this is gonna bring up the files on my computer and we should be adding a custom thumbnail because if you add a custom thumbnail it going to skyrocket your reach In fact to prove this you I want to come over here we could come over to YouTube we could come over to my other channel because as you guys know I have multiple different channels on YouTube

[06:26] we're going to come over here and what you are going to see is if we actually click on this channel right here we come over into my shorts sorry I clicked on the wrong thing we click on shorts we click on popular and we scroll down we can see all these have custom thumbnails this

[06:42] video went viral, this video went viral, this video went viral, this video went viral, this video went viral. And guess what? Those custom thumbnails are the reason that my content's going viral. And the way that I'm actually making these is actually by using this tool,

[06:54] contentbuddy.ai, because they actually have this YouTube Shorts thumbnail generator right here that allows you to create scroll-stopping thumbnails for your YouTube Shorts. You can come over here and you can choose exactly what style you want to make based on what

[07:06] you're doing. I always just go with natural. You can add in images. So if you wanted to add in an image of yourself, we can actually come over here and we can just add in headshot right here, and we can grab this headshot, and then we describe exactly what we want to make. For example,

[07:18] we want to make a video about how to go viral on TikTok. If we wanted to, we could click on enhance prompt, and this will actually go through and write us a better prompt. It's not totally necessary to do that, and if you are going to do that, you want to make sure that you read through

[07:32] and that it actually makes sense what this gave you right here, but then you click on generate thumbnail and this actually goes off and generates the thumbnail for us. Now from here we could create a new one, we could download it, we could edit it, like if we wanted to change something we simply just click on edit, we tell it how we

[07:46] want to edit it, and that will actually do it. But otherwise we could click on download right here. This is now downloaded and if we come back over into our studio and let's say we wanted to add it onto this video right here, we would simply just come over here and we would click on change and then we would

[08:02] actually upload this thumbnail right here. So it allows us to upload it and boom we now have a custom thumbnail. And if you're not doing this, I'm telling you, it could be one of the things that's lowering your views. In fact, most YouTube shorts that go viral

[08:14] have these custom thumbnails. And this is probably one of the most important things that you could do right now. It's not only do this for all of your old videos, do it for your new content, and it's going to help increase your views. And the best part about content, buddy,

[08:26] is that if you go to the Pink Comic World, you can get started today with a free trial. This was an absolute no-brainer. It's helped me get tens of millions of views on YouTube, and I think it's going to help you too. Now, changing before, you need to make sure that there aren't any spelling mistakes or any errors inside of your subtitles,

[08:40] because if there are, it could actually be hurting the metadata on your YouTube Shorts, and this could hold you back. So when it comes to making sure that those subtitles are actually correct, here's how you're going to do that. So from inside of Details right here, we're going to see Subtitles.

[08:52] You want to make sure that you're clicking on this, and you want to make sure that this is all accurate, because if not, something's spelt wrong, it could actually be disjointed on your views. For example, I'm actually going to come over into my other channel and show you an example of this that happens to me all the time.

[09:04] So we can see if this video is about new ChatGPT prompts that help you go viral on YouTube. So I have that in the title, I have it in the description, I have it also inside of the tags here. Those things make up our metadata.

[09:16] Now, we come over here into subtitles, all the time this goes through and this actually spells this wrong, so look at this. Use this ChatBT prompt So guess what that then does It then communicates to YouTube that hey this video is about chat BT YouTube doesn know what that is So YouTube gets confused They don know if I messed up in the subtitles They don know if I messed up in the hookup by video They don

[09:37] know if I messed up in my title. They don't know if I messed up in my tags, in my description. So this is actually confusing the YouTube algorithm. This type of confusion can actually hurt the views that you're getting on the video because the last thing that you want is for the YouTube algorithm

[09:49] to be confused, to share your content, potentially to the wrong people, which is why you want to be going through always double-checking these. And if anything's messed up, you want to change it. In fact, I need to come over here and I need to change this right here to chat GPT.

[10:02] We're then going to click on Done, and we're going to save this as New. And that last thing that you need to make sure is happening is, one, you need to make sure that your subscribers are actually helping you and not hurting you on YouTube. And you need to make sure the languages that you have turned on on your content,

[10:15] and by the way, even if you didn't touch these, YouTube is going to touch them for you, are going to be accurate and correct so that you get the most views. Now, in order to actually see these detailed analytics, and what I'm actually meaning by this,

[10:27] you want to come over here and you want to come over into your shorts. For example, if we come over here, we could see, if we scroll down a little bit, let's say this video right here. So this video got 7,600 views, and if we actually come into the details right here,

[10:41] this will tell us exactly why this video did well or didn't do well. So there are two things you want to be aiming for. first and foremost, stayed to watch right here, needs to be over 75%. If it's not, your video is not going to go viral. That's why this video did all right, but didn't go viral. If we come over

[10:55] to average view duration, this ideally needs to actually be bigger than this number. So those two things are the reason that this video didn't do well. So I think that this video was fine. It just wasn't amazing in order to get over the hump. So what we would want to change is I would want to

[11:08] go through and I would want to change a hook and I would want to change something about the video to increase the average reiteration. Now, there's more detailed analytics. If we come over here and we actually look at this chart, we can now click on See More right here, and this is going to allow us to actually come in here

[11:21] and be able to segment this. For example, if we look at this, we can look at this as subscribers versus non-subscribers, and we can see who is actually hurting our account. So we can see subscribers here isn't hurting us. In fact, it's helping us because it was a higher stay to watch

[11:34] and a higher average reiteration. If we come over here, we can see this by new and returning viewers, new casual and regular viewers, and organic versus paid traffic. Obviously, if it didn't run ads on this, so there'd be no paid traffic. If we come over here, we could see the audience retention.

[11:47] We could see compared to other videos. We could see detailed activity. For example, if we look at detailed activity right here, this shows where people actually stopped watching and how many people stopped watching there. So if there was a part in your video where that spiked,

[11:59] that would be something you'd want to pay attention to. If we come over here and to compare it to other videos, this shows it compared to all of our other videos. You want to make sure that you're looking at all these analytics because they're going to show you and they're going to tell you different things

[12:12] and actually give you more detailed insights for how you could be fixing your content and what you might actually be doing wrong if YouTube isn't pushing out your shorts. Now, if you enjoyed this video and you want to learn exactly how the YouTube algorithm works right now

[12:24] so that you can get more views, you can get more followers, and ultimately you can get monetized, I would strongly suggest you check out this video right here that walks you through exactly how it works, how to take advantage of it so you can grow faster. If that's something interesting, I'll see you over there.