How a smart engagement strategy tricked me into subscribing?

This story is about engagement and content differentiation. It’s a good example of how to make your content stand out by building and maintaining engagement over time.

I have never played BeamNG.drive in my life. I’m not a big fan of car games either. So, how did I become a follower of a YouTube channel that posts exclusively short clips of BeamNG.drive?

For those who don’t know, BeamNG.drive is a vehicle simulation game. It’s so popular on Steam that the game ranks as the 17th best Steam games of all time according to gamer reviews. The game’s popularity comes from its soft-body physics that allows vehicle damage to be realistically simulated.

Thousands of YouTube channels share video clips from BeamNG. As I said above, I’m not a fan of car games. I’m not supposed to be part of the audience for this type of content. But the YouTube algorithm disagreed. It kept recommending me car gaming content, pushing more and more unsolicited videos. That’s how I came across BeamNG videos.

While I was being flooded with BeamNG content from many channels, I eventually subscribed to one of them, SuperReact.

There’s something special about this channel.

If you look at the history of SuperReact, the very first videos look quite similar to what other BeamNG creators do. It’s all about car crashes. There’s no connection, no thread between the videos. Viewers are unlikely to engage with the content.

After some time, SuperReact tried something new. It released a series of recorded clips from BeamNG where selected cars had to complete a challenge. Still classic BeamNG content. But it introduced something new. Among the competing cars, were Teslas. And surprisingly, all Tesla vehicles would fail miserably in the challenges, as shown in the video below:

It was obviously a joke. But unexpectedly, it generated engagement by dividing viewers into two groups: a first group that found the joke hilarious, and a second group that was angered by the so-called relentlessness against Tesla. Both groups argued with each other in the comments, driving further engagement.

SuperReact realised that the joke was a fantastic hook. By taping into its audience’s passion for cars, the content had managed to connect with viewers on an emotional level. And SuperReact had set an expectation: the community was now waiting for the next series of videos to see how the Tesla cars would fail the challenge.

A few days later, he shared a new series of videos. Unsurprisingly, all the Teslas failed to complete the challenge. It drove viewers craaazy. Tesla fans labelled the channel as being anti-EV or anti-Elon, while a majority of viewers found the videos more hilarious than ever.

The story could have ended here. SuperReact could have posted video after video of Tesla cars failing to complete the challenge. Engagement would have eventually waned as people got bored of watching the same content. But the community would have been big enough by then to keep the money pouring.

Well, this is not what happened. A few months later, SuperReact did something surprising. It released a new series of videos. In one of them, the Tesla car successfully completed the challenge, breaking the expected pattern. Once again, viewers went nuts. The channel reached an all-time high in engagement.

Breaking out of nowhere with the community’s expectation and the running gag that made the channel popular was risky. But it was a smart move because it reinvigorated engagement. By introducing uncertainty into its content, breaking habits and expectations, SuperReact renewed it’s community’s engagement around a new hook. Instead of watching its content to know HOW the Teslas will fail, viewers watch its content to know IF the Teslas will fail. Viewers don’t know what to expect. They must watch the videos to find out.

Beyond, this new hook had a significant benefit: Tesla fans who had stopped consuming content out of frustration started coming back, surprised but pleased by this turnaround. The hook reinvigorated engagement across the whole community, uniting viewers rather than dividing them.

That’s how SuperReact won my heart - and my subscription. I wasn’t the target audience. I wasn’t even interested in the content. But the engagement strategy was clever enough to get my attention. Of course, the fact that YouTube harassed me with car gaming content for weeks had its influence. But SuperReact is the only channel I’ve subscribed to. Because of its engagement strategy.

There’s a lesson here for me. If your engagement strategy is good enough, you can engage far beyond your target audience. But don’t forget to update your engagement strategy regularly to keep people engaged.