Sharing your video on socials can actually hurt it. Here’s the right way to do it.

Hey,

An old client messaged me this week. He’s relaunching a new channel, the early videos are flat, and his instinct was the same one almost every creator has. “Maybe I just need to send some external traffic to them to get them going again.”

I get why it feels right as the video is sitting there with low views, you have an audience on Instagram or LinkedIn or an email list, so you point them at it.

More views is more views, right?

Here’s the thing. External traffic only helps if the people clicking are people who would genuinely watch that video anyway. Otherwise you get a bump in views from the wrong crowd, and you slightly confuse the algorithm’s read of who your channel is for.

And the way most people send that traffic makes it worse. They post the link.

Why the link hurts you

When someone taps a link in your Instagram story, YouTube sees a burst of external traffic it can’t read.

It doesn’t know where these people came from or why they’re there. A lot of them tapped out of politeness or idle curiosity, so they bounce in the first 30 seconds, and now your video’s early watch time, the metric YouTube weights most heavily, looks weak exactly when YouTube is deciding how hard to push it.

You wanted to give your video a boost and you've accidently slowed it down.

What to do instead

Post a screenshot of the title and thumbnail on your story with no link.

That’s it. The people who genuinely want to watch will open YouTube, search your name, and click it.

Now look at what YouTube sees. A user opened the app on their own, searched for you specifically, clicked your video, and watched it properly, because anyone who went to that much effort clearly wanted to be there.

That’s 1 impression and 1 view of the strongest possible kind, and it’s the exact signal that tells YouTube to go and find more people like them.

The link version and the screenshot version reach the same followers but one trains YouTube that your video makes strangers leave quickly and the other trains YouTube that people actively seek you out.

It’s why MrBeast never posts a link to a new video. Go and look, you'll see it’s always a screenshot.

Your action steps for this week

1. Next upload, post the title and thumbnail to your story as a screenshot, and if you want to prompt people, “new video, search my name on YouTube” is plenty.
2. Save the actual link for the places YouTube treats differently, your newsletter and community are fine, and even then wait 24 hours so the video earns its on-platform signals first.
3. If a past video got a big external push and never recovered, that’s probably why. Let the next ones earn a clean read.

This is a pretty small change, and it costs you nothing. The people who were going to watch still watch andYouTube just finally gets to see them choosing you.

Jamie