8 YouTube Tips for 2025: Trends and Tactics You Need Now

Do you know what separates the best YouTube channels from the rest? Some self-proclaimed YouTube gurus claim it’s a strategy. And they talk rubbish. The real difference between the best content creators and other YouTubers is that the top ones implement all these smart YouTube tips & tactics in practice!

YouTube is the second most visited website in the world. Many content creators have built their careers and wealth thanks to the platform, and many brands have skyrocketed their presence & sales.

These eight YouTube tips will help you do the same. Under one condition: you take action.

8 Key YouTube Tips and Strategies for 2025

01 Prioritize short-form video

Short-form video is dominating.

According to Alphabet Investor Relations, over 70 billion YouTube Shorts are watched every day.

That’s a hilarious number, proving that even the biggest brands simply can’t ignore this format!

For example, Red Bull – a brand almost synonymous with extreme sports and high-energy content – uses YouTube Shorts to increase its engagement and brand visibility on YouTube.

Red Bull’s strategy involves sharing highlights of its adrenaline-pumping events (skydiving, mountain biking, etc.), behind-the-scenes videos, and exciting user-generated content.

The result? Red Bull’s top Shorts exceed 400 million views on YouTube!

How to win with YouTube Shorts?

✅ Hook viewers in the first 3 seconds. Attention spans are short, so grab interest fast!

✅ Keep it fast-paced and engaging. Use quick cuts, dynamic visuals, and bold storytelling.

✅ Use emojis. They grab attention, add personality, and make your content engaging.

02 Use trending audio

TikTok may be banned in the US, but its impact is continuous. Its biggest legacy is the power of trending music.

Viral sounds heavily influence YouTube Shorts and even long-form videos.

Creators and brands that leverage trending audio can tap into existing momentum, boost discoverability, and ride the algorithm’s wave to reach a wider audience.

Why does using trending audio matter?

✅ Higher visibility. YouTube often prioritizes videos that use trending sounds, making them more likely to appear in recommendations.

✅ Increased watch time. People are naturally drawn to familiar sounds, making them more likely to continue watching the video. And that’s a strong positive signal for the YouTube algorithm.

✅ Stronger emotional connection. Music sets the mood of a video, making content more memorable and shareable.

03 Create eye-catching thumbnails

A thumbnail is usually the first – and often, the last – touchpoint between your content viewers. If it doesn’t grab attention instantly, people will scroll past without giving your video a chance.

What does it mean “instantly”?

Well, according to CustomThumbnails.com, people take 10-20 milliseconds to decide whether to click or ignore your thumbnail.

It’s literally a blink of an eye.

If you waste your chance, they’ll scroll down and forget about your thumbnail for the rest of their lives.

How to create captivating thumbnails?

✅ Strike with an image. Your thumbnail must catch the attention immediately. Featuring a close-up face is a good idea. Thumbnails with faces are even 11 times more noticeable!

✅ Include mystery. A good thumbnail should provoke viewers to click on it. Use thought-provoking questions, a blur effect, or a teaser.

✅ Intrigue with text. Add some text to your image. Use keywords that reflect your video content. The font size should be large enough to read on a small thumbnail. Also, choose a contrasting color.

04 Try social listening

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, social listening is the process of tracking and analyzing online discussions around a brand.

In other words, social listening means detecting and informing you about every situation when someone uses a keyword you track (like your YouTube channel name).

And it doesn’t really matter if such a mention is tagged or untagged.

How can social listening help grow your channel?

✅ Understand how the YouTube community perceives you. The best social listening tools don’t just track mentions. They use AI-powered sentiment analysis, detect trends, competitor benchmarking & much more.

✅ Support your omnichannel activity. People don’t just discuss your brand on YouTube – they do it on social media, blogs, and forums. Social listening tools help you track all these conversations in one place.

✅ Generate content ideas. Discover what excites or frustrates your audience and use that data to refine your YouTube content.

⭐ The best social listening tool

Brand24 is an AI-powered social listening tool that tracks brand mentions across multiple sources, including:

• YouTube & other video platforms
• Social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, Telegram, Twitch)
• News sites, blogs, podcasts, review sites, newsletters & other websites

What makes Brand24 stand out? Deep sentiment analysis, AI-powered emotion detection, anomaly tracking, and competitor insights. These are just a few examples of its powerful features.

05 Caption your videos

According to a Verizon Media study, 83% of people watch videos with the sound off.

Even more impressive, 4 out of 5 viewers are more likely to watch an entire video when captions are available. That’s why you should not underestimate the importance of captioning in your videos.

Besides, captions are one of the most low-effort YouTube tips to implement in practice. Why?

Because YouTube allows you to generate auto-captions with just a few clicks, making it incredibly easy to add subtitles to your videos.

Unfortunately, these captions are definitely not perfect. So, if your YouTube videos are full of spoken content, take care of subtitles manually.

You have two options:

1. Upload custom subtitles in YouTube Studio.
2. Upload a video with embedded subtitles.

Why should you use captions in your YouTube videos?

✅ Boost accessibility. Captions make your content more inclusive for viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing.

✅ Improve watch time. Most users watch videos on mute, especially on mobile. Captions significantly improve their engagement.

✅ Enhance SEO. YouTube’s algorithm can index closed captions. That helps your videos rank for relevant keywords.

06 Post YouTube videos at the right time

Let’s talk about one of the simplest – yet powerful – YouTube tips: post your content at the right time.

But when is the right time to post on YouTube?

There’s no universal answer, as it depends on your target audience’s habits, location, and engagement patterns. However, data-driven insights can help you find your own ideal posting time.

The first way to define the best time to post on YouTube is through a native YouTube analytics tool.

Log in to your YouTube account and visit YouTube Studio. Then, choose the “Analytics” dashboard and switch the view to “Audience”.

Scroll a bit down to see the interactive matrix “When your viewers are on YouTube”.

This view is pretty intuitive: the darker the purple color, the higher the chance your viewers are active on YouTube.

While simple, YouTube Studio has two significant disadvantages:

❌ You can’t set the date range (it provides only the stats from the last 28 days)

❌ You can’t use filters (like geolocation, type of activity, language, etc.).

A more advanced and flexible approach is to use Brand24’s “Hot Hours” feature, which goes beyond YouTube’s built-in analytics limits.

Brand24 analyzes audience behavior and provides a clear visual breakdown of the best times to post based on interactions with your content, its reach, or mentions.

With Hot Hours, you can:

✅ Apply filters. You can adjust your posting times more precisely based on granular data such as geolocation, time zone, language, and so on.

✅ Optimize your posting for mentions’ volume, reach, and interactions. Find out when people are talking about your channel the most.

✅ Test and iterate. Compare different posting times and track performance over time to find the sweet spot that works best for your channel.

💡 Pro Tip: Upload timing

Uploading YouTube videos can take a few hours. Plan ahead, especially if you’re making videos for monetization.

07 Master YouTube SEO

YouTube isn’t just a video platform – it’s the second-largest search engine in the world. That means many traditional SEO principles apply here as well.

Dozens of YouTube metrics influence your ’videos’ positions in YouTube search results. Engagement, audience retention, thumbnail CTR, watch time – I could spend a while enumerating them.

Here, let’s focus on text elements that can impact your YouTube ranking positions. All of them require one common preparation step: keyword research.

Honestly, it’s almost the same as typical keyword research, i.e., for creating blog content. The only difference is the search engine itself.

As for a YouTube-specific SEO tool, SEMrush offers “Keyword Analytics for YouTube”, helping you discover high-volume search terms to target in your video content.

Now, let’s break down the key text elements you need to optimize:

✅ Video titles. Alongside thumbnails, your title is one of the first things viewers notice. Include the most relevant keyword at the beginning. Keep your title clear, engaging, and click-worthy.

✅ Descriptions. YouTube allows up to 5,000 characters, making descriptions a powerful SEO tool. Use important keywords early – especially in the first 120 characters, since that part appears in search previews.

✅ Video file name. YouTube’s algorithm reads file names before you even upload a video. So, instead of using random “video231412.mp4” use the keyword-rich file name like “best-action-camera-for-skiing.mp4”.

✅ YouTube hashtags and tags. Hashtags help categorize your content, while tags provide context for YouTube’s search engine. Use them strategically, not randomly.

✅ Subtitiles & captions. YouTube indexes captions, making them a hidden SEO booster. Upload custom subtitles or edit auto-generated ones for accuracy and search benefits. If you need more info, scroll up to paragraph 5.

08 Collaborate with influencers

Collaborating with influencers is another wonderful tactic on our best YouTube tips list.

It is one of the most powerful and effective ways to expand your reach, build credibility & brand awareness, and tap into new audiences.

Engaging in influencer collabs is a key tactic that many successful YouTube creators and brands use to accelerate their growth.

For example, in 2023, Red Bull started its partnership with a popular gaming influencer, Lachlan.

By collaborating with a creator deeply embedded in gaming culture, Red Bull successfully expanded its brand visibility beyond extreme sports, engaging a new, younger demographic.

Okay, but why does it work so well?

Influencers already have established trust and engagement with their followers.

When they feature your brand or collaborate with you, it feels more natural and authentic than a traditional paid ad.

And how to find influencers effectively?

Finding influencers can be time-consuming, but AI tools can do it for you fast and efficiently. Here, what matters the most is the accuracy. And the accuracy comes from the data.

❌ The widely available AI tools like ChatGPT access only publicly available data. Therefore, their content creator recommendations are generic.

✅ On the other hand, tool like Brand24 accesses a lot of internal and brand-specific data. It analyzes real-time brand mentions, audience sentiment, influencer impact & many other metrics.

✅ Those first-hand data make Brand24 influencer recommendations highly relevant and tailored to your brand.

For example, I asked the AI Brand Assistant – the Brand24 AI-powered chatbot equipped with internal project data – to provide me with the top three new influencers with whom Red Bull should collaborate.

The Brand24’s AI feature suggested that these should be Mark Rober, Yes Theory, and Dude Perfect.

And these are more than accurate choices!

Conclusion

Growing a successful YouTube channel isn’t about luck. It’s about applying the right strategies consistently and smartly.

Utilize the power of short-form videos & trending audio to boost engagement. Create captivating custom thumbnails that instantly grab attention.

Optimize your YouTube SEO elements, such as titles, descriptions, or tags, to maximize your chances of being discovered.

Also, do not forget about captions. They improve accessibility and increase watch time.

Leverage social listening tools like Brand24. They will help you track conversations about your channel and uncover valuable audience insights.

Post at the right time. This will ensure that your videos reach the most viewers when they’re actively engaged.

Finally, collaborate with influencers! It’s an extremely powerful tactic for expanding your reach and strengthening your credibility within your niche.

In the end, remember that they only point you the right way.

Because watching videos about YouTube growth or reading expert advice won’t make your channel blow up.

To succeed, execution is everything. Good luck!

Final thoughts:

• Short-form content is likely to keep growing. Experiment with YouTube Shorts to increase visibility.
• Trending audio gives your content an extra boost. Stay updated with viral sounds to tap into organic reach.
• Posting time affects performance. Use tools like Brand24’s Hot Hours to publish at optimal moments.
• Collabs aren’t just for big brands. By partnering with the right influencers, even small creators can grow fast.

Put theory into practice! Start a Brand24 free 14-day trial and take your YouTube channel to a higher level!