The morning drive is full of all sorts of radio stations, and most of them have some kind of morning show, oftentimes driven by the music the station plays, but how do you decide which one to listen to? (I realize I mentioned radio stations and we work with building YouTube channels, but bear with me)
Say you have two local sports stations in the area. Most times people pick one or the other to listen to. They're often reporting on the same sports and scores from the night before along with whatever news broke overnight, but why do you listen to one over the other? It's just people talking sports isn't it? True, it's literally people talking about sports, but it's the personality of the people on the show that make a person choose one over the other. The hosts, how the show does things, what sort of segments they do, all of these work into building an identity for their show. Maybe they're the more serious, news-oriented type of show, or maybe they're more laidback and silly, leaning toward a comedy style.
Even though technology and the way people consume media has changed drastically over the past decade or so, many techniques used in older media types are still just as relevant today as they were then, so let's take a look at how one could go about establishing an identity like radio shows do.
Who do you want to be?
Although things like radio shows are live and YouTube videos are often unscripted, they're both putting on some kind of a performance for their audience. Even if you're not playing a character, you still need character when releasing videos. You want to be memorable and have people enjoy not just the content, but the person or people making the content. Having this will help your YouTube channel grow.
One of the first steps is to identify not just what sort of content you want to make (if you haven't already), but who you want to be while you do it. That's not to say you necessarily need to invent a brand new persona in order to have a successful YouTube channel, in my videos I'm very much the same way I am in real life for example, but you want to make sure there's some personality coming through to your audience. If you're giving a review for a movie you don't want to just drone through an essay and give your viewers a reason to forget about you once they close the tab.
