How to Establish Trust with Your Audience:
If you’ve been involved with the YouTube fan community, then you’re likely familiar with the so-called “cancel culture.” When a celebrity is caught doing something their audience disapproves; their followers decide they’ve been “canceled”. Dropping their support, cancel culture can make social media difficult to navigate as a creator. YouTube stars Niki and Gabi recently made a video about how cancel culture impacted a video they tried to film. In this article, we provide the guidelines for protecting you from the cancel culture and establishing trust with your audience.
Stick to YouTube Community Guidelines
To protect your reputation from cancel culture, it’s important to establish trust with your audience. If they know they can depend on you, this is the most important way to protect your reputation. YouTube’s Community Guidelines will not only keep your channel safe, but it will also protect your monetization status. YouTube bans any content that is sexual, harmful, dangerous, violent, or graphic.
It also bans cyberbullying, spam, scams, threats, privacy, and copyright protection. While these guidelines may seem easy to stick to, the Logan Paul suicide forest video scandal of last year is in the back of your mind. Before you upload something, read through the Community Guidelines again. Think about the kind of videos you’d allow your children to watch if you were a parent and act accordingly.
If the sponsored status of a video isn’t explicitly clear to your audience, then you’re breaking the law. Though specific rules vary by country, most social media platforms require you to carefully disclose YouTube videos. Read the guidelines in order to learn everything you need to know about legally disclosing sponsorships and to establish trust with your audience.
Taking things a step further, evaluate the service before taking any sponsorship, and research its business practices. If you find a lot of negative reviews regarding a potential scam, then steer clear of that sponsor. Everything you do as a YouTuber should be done to establish trust with your audience in mind. If you fail to put their best interest first, you may find yourself losing their support the very next day.
Never post, whether it’s a video, without thinking the potential impact it could have to establish trust with your audience. For example, should it come with a trigger warning, or is it potentially controversial? A good rule of thumb is to consider your audience as friends, but you also want their support. If what you’re doing in a video could make you lose friends in real life, then you shouldn’t put it on the internet.
Engage with Your Audience
The best way to establish trust with your audience is to build a relationship with them, reply to their tweets and comments. Live stream YouTube videos on a regular basis so you can talk to them in real-time to establish trust. Treat your viewers like your friends, and then they’ll come to think of you as a friend. As an influencer, you are responsible for more than just entertaining your audience. Their well-being is partially your responsibility because of the potential impact your content has on them.
