Over the years, YouTube has become the go-to place for content creators to showcase their amazing work to a massive audience. YouTube gets over 30 million visits a day, according to blog.elink.io. And in a period of time when Facebook is pushing a lot on video content, YouTube decided it’s high time it got back on its target radar as the number one video platform out there. Therefore, one of its moves was creating YouTube Community, a place for YouTubers to interact with their fans and followers in a very friendly environment. The YouTube Community gives creators a space to post various types of status updates – polls, pictures, text, GIFs, links and more. Subscribers and other visitors can then like or comment on these posts.
At launch, YouTube had extended the feature to just a few creators, and, according to engadget.com, the rollout has been slow ever since. But the response has been pretty positive and YouTube said it planned to add more channels following the launch. And, in fact, at the end of November last year, YouTube today announced that its Community feature is available to anyone who has a channel with more than 10,000 subscribers. The YouTube Community tab replaces the Discussion tab, the place where creators and viewers used to have general conversations. The main difference between the Community tab and the Discussion tab is that the Discussion tab was purely text-based, whereas the Community tab allows a variety of posting and discussion capabilities.
To get inspiration for your own community posts, follow the community posts of channels you subscribe to by visiting their Community tab or by viewing the Subscriptions tab of the YouTube app.
“It’s extremely important to engage with your users in the comments section. Try to respond to every comment you get; not only will this help your video engagement, it’ll help you mold your community as you see fit. Also, the more engaged a specific user is with your channel, the higher the likelihood that your videos will make it into their emails and notifications,” wrote Jayson DeMers for Forbes.
How to use the community tab feature to its best capacities? Here are some steps that will help you along the way:
- Tell your followers about the new feature and how you intend to use it, for them. To add a link to your Community tab in the video description, open the tab and copy the URL from your browser’s address bar. Share the video on your Community tab to make sure first-time visitors to this tab know what they can do to engage with your channel.
- Reach more. Try cross promoting other channels and creators, or promote your own second channel through the Community tab. This is a handy way of increasing your reach and letting people know about the other content that you care about.
- Make sure your subscribers enable the notifications. You may use a video or a community post (or both) to let subscribers know how to get notified about your latest channel activity. Tell them that they need to click the bell icon to the right of the button they use to subscribe.
- Use polls to get to know more about your target. Polls are a great way in which you can easily find out if they liked your video or not or what they want to see next. You can then refine your content based on their suggestions and provide more quality content to your audience.
- Promote your products. “Post a status update to the tab with an image of your product and a link to the product’s sales page. Consider creating a special landing page on your website for your channel subscribers and offer an exclusive discount just for YouTube visitors to measure the results,” said socialmediaexaminer.com.
- Create teasers with the following content of your videos or/and of important launches and events you have for your brand. Offering this exclusive new content will spark their interest and get them on your channel when you launch the new finished product or service. At the same time,you can also promote successful past videos for the people that haven’t seen them yet.
- Share exclusive GIFs and memes. Don’t forget we all want to have fun and enjoy our lives and we were drown to the social media platforms because they offered just that. A brand that can show emotion and humor is a brand that will always win people’s hearts and one that they can relate to.
