Your community on YouTube starts and ends with those who engage with your content.
So here's 10 tips on how to get the best out of YouTube comments to help grow your channel.
The most obvious tip and perhaps the most cliched.
Read every comment.
When a viewer watches a video they commit time, when they post a comment they commit
not only more time, but invest thought, emotion, effort and hope into something that encourages
a response - just like the video you made.
You owe it to your community to make sure that comment is read.
And once they are read you should reply to as many as possible too.
The best way to view all your video comments is through the comments tab in the community
section of the video manager page.
Responding to comments creates a conversation.
It turns viewers into subscribers, maybe even fans and look at it from this point of view.
If you respond to every comment on a video you double the engagement rate which YouTube's
algorithm will respond positively to.
Of course if you get hundreds of comments a day responding to every one might be impossible
so vidIQ has two free tools that might help.
The comment filter tool allows you to filter by amount of channel subscribers.
So if you need to prioritise what you might call high value comments from channels with
lots of subscribers this is the tool for you.
We also leave a subscriber count next to each comment too.
Our second tool is a vidIQ button that sits next to every comment.
Click on it and you can create, save and use template responses.
These might be general thank yous or specific answers to questions and opinions that often
come up in your videos.
They are a real time saver but try not to overuse them.
You don't want to copy and paste every response to a comment.
As well as responding to comments you can react to them too.
You should give every positive comment a thumbs up again to boost engagement but it also acts
as a receipt that you read the comment.
For comments that go that extra mile you can use the love button.
These give real value back to the person who posted the comment because it informs them
through a notification.
Again it's all positive engagement and community building.
Now occasionally there may be a comment that add so much to a video that you want to pin
it to the top of the comments list.
These might be comments that add extra information to the video, provide a great opinion that
generates a lot of conversation or a comment from someone you collaborated with in the
video.
On the video page you can click the dots next to the comment to pin it, but thanks for vidIQ
there is a much easier and more convenient way to do it.
On the comment manager page we have added a pin button where you can pin any comment
from any video.
That will save you loads of time having to go directly to the video.
And of course this vidIQ tool is also free.
One final tip on pinned comments, you can use it yourself if you want to create a second
description box.
People don't tend to extend description boxes but they will always see a pinned comment
if they look at the comment section.
In this example we added timestamps to a long video to help viewers navigate it.
Now this tip is a little more advanced as not every YouTube channel has it, but if you
do have the community tab make sure to use it as it's super powerful.
You can post general updates, pictures, even voting polls.
Consider it Twitter, Facebook or Instagram timeline for YouTube.
Now the reason this so powerful is because of its reach.
These posts appear in mobile subscription timelines so you can get tons of engagement
from your subscribers.
As I say this is not available to all channels and it's unclear how useful this tool will
be when more YouTubers gain access to it.
The final tip we have on comments is a necessary evil but one that should be checked every
once in a while.
YouTube does a fairly good job of putting spam comments into the spam folder, but occasionally
it doesn't quite get it right and dumps valuable comments in there too.
So scan the list and recover any comments you feel shouldn't be spam.
We hope you found these tips useful and remember some of these tools do come from the free
portion of vidIQ so make sure to download it from the link in the description.
Enjoy the rest of your video making day, bye for now.