- The YouTube community tab is a powerful way
to grow your channel and engage with your audience,
allowing you to reach not just your current subscribers
but also new non-subscribers
incredibly easily with the community posts.
So we're gonna run through everything you need to know
from how to enable the YouTube community tab
or the community posts functionality,
and the minimum requirements,
right through to the latest community features
and how to use community posts
to grow your YouTube channel faster.
So, we've been testing and using community posts
for quite a while now.
And there definitely seems to be one
community post type in particular,
that currently gets a lot more traction than others.
So, I'll cover exactly what it is
and how to use it as we go through as well.
So for a really quick overview,
you could think of community posts,
almost like Facebook posts.
You have the ability to post other content on YouTube now
that's not just your YouTube videos,
so you could post a text post,
you could do a poll,
you could post an image or a GIF,
and you can also post links to YouTube videos as well.
Now, on desktop you can view these posts on the homepage
if you scroll down a little bit,
you'll see a section there for latest posts.
You'll also be able to go directly
to a specific YouTube channel,
click on the community tab,
and view all of the posts that that channel has made.
And they're also starting to feature this content
in different areas throughout the platform as well.
But, two big changes that have recently happened
on the smartphone side of things,
is that your community posts are now showing up
in so many more places,
and you can now actually create
community posts from your phones as well.
So when you open the YouTube app,
even just on the main home screen area,
just scrolling down, you're likely gonna see
a few posts that are presented to you there,
but also under the subscriptions area as well,
from channels that you are subscribed to.
Now, if your channel is under 500 subscribers right now,
you don't have access to this,
but they have said that they're looking to expand that
to make it accessible for more people soon.
So like I said, these posts are a great way for you
to connect and engage with your audience on a deeper level,
outside of your regular YouTube videos.
These posts could be behind the scenes stuff
that you're sharing
to again, deepen that relationship with them.
It could be that you're asking them questions
or feedback on things outside of,
even what you're covering off in your regular videos.
You could run polls, you could survey your audience,
to find out about what they like and what they're up to,
and maybe where they see the direction
of your channel going.
Or you can even use it to share out
your own YouTube videos as well,
in case your audience hadn't seen them yet.
But one of the big things that we've seen with this,
and we've seen a few other people talking about this
as well,
is that there is organic reach
with these community posts as well.
Meaning that people outside of your current subscriber base
can find an interact with you through these community posts.
Now, this is something that isn't guaranteed,
but this is something that can definitely help you
increase your reach on the platform,
with people maybe interacting with your posts
long before they've even seen any of your video content.
And there's also good reason to believe
that once someone has interacted with your channel
through a community post,
even if they haven't seen any of your content before,
they're now much more likely to see some of your content
because you've interacted with that channel.
So creating and sharing posts is really easy,
on the YouTube website,
you just wanna come up to the top little create button,
the picture of the camera with a plus,
and then in there you can choose create post.
This will actually take you over
to your community tab page on your YouTube channel,
where if we scroll down,
you'll see all of your previous posts,
but to create a post,
just wanna be back up on the top area here.
And you can see, this is where we can enter some text.
We can select video here,
if you wanna add a YouTube video.
So, we can search YouTube for a video
and we can select our video that way,
or we can copy and paste in the link to the YouTube video.
Or you can actually view all of your YouTube videos in here,
if you wanna link off to those.
You can also create a poll with the next one here.
So we could go something like Mac or windows,
and then we can give the options, Mac windows,
and we can add more options down here if we want to,
you are limited to five though
but we can remove those here,
if we don't want those in there,
or if we cancel out of this,
we can also add in an image or a GIF.
And it says down the bottom here,
we can upload an image with an aspect ratio
between two by five and five by two.
And it also says, only select images and GIFS
that you have permission to use.
Now, they also give you a little suggestions on here
as to the different things that you could post.
So share an image to start a caption contest.
I've seen quite a few different options
or suggestions pop up in here now.
So that's pretty cool
that they're actually helping people out with this.
So if we refresh again and it's now saying,
What's on your mind?
Or again, share a behind the scenes photo.
So to post one, let's just type something out here.
Who's having a great week?
Share your wins down in the comments for us all to see
so we'll do this one here just as a text post
with no videos, polls, or images.
The other thing you can do when you're adding text in here
is you can @ mention people.
So he could go Nick, and it's gonna suggest
Nick Nimmin or Nicki Minaj.
Let's Nick Nimmin, so he will get a notification,
but that will also be a clickable link
for other people to be taken over to Nick's channel.
So it's awesome that you can create posts
and you can mention other people
or channels in those posts too.
So let's remove that one now,
and when we go to posts,
we can just hit the button,
or if we hit the dropdown arrow here,
we can also schedule a post.
So this is going to be posted at a later date or time.
So then we can choose the date, the time and the time zone
that we wanna have this posted in.
And we can schedule it up that way just by hitting schedule,
or if we decide we do want to post it straight away,
we can hit that little cross here and then hit post
and we've now created a community post
that we will see here on our community page.
Now to create a post on the mobile app,
you'll just want to come down
to the plus in the bottom middle and choose create a post.
Again, we can type out some text,
if you wanna create a poll, the button to do that
is down the bottom left hand corner here,
we can add our options in there
or if you wanna add an image,
then we can press the next button across from there as well.
Now, to share out a YouTube video from the app right now,
you will need to copy and paste the link in
or go and find the video that you wanna share.
Let's say this video here from Think Media,
we can hit share, and we can choose create a post.
And this is gonna link
and embed that video in our community post.
Now to schedule a post from here,
you will need to hit that little icon
of a clock at the top there,
and we can again pick the date time and time zone
for when we want this post to be sent out.
And once you're good to go,
you can hit the post button in the top right-hand corner
and your post will be posted.
So even just scrolling through here now,
and you can see how much the community posts are showing up.
There's another one here from Andrew.
Keep going down is another one here from Think Media,
keep going down, Evan Carmichael.
You can see just how much they're pushing this
on the app right now.
And in terms of analytics or data
that you can gather to see if these are working for you,
there's two places that you can check out.
The first is on your community page,
where you can scroll through your posts
and you can see some high level numbers,
so you can see we've got 7,100 votes on this one,
it's been up for six days,
It's had 322 likes and 68 comments.
So everything's from below it, 6,300 votes, 335 and 98.
But for some more detailed analytics,
you can actually jump into your YouTube analytics,
and there's now data on your posts as well.
So you wanna come up to your profile picture
and select YouTube studio,
and this is something that they're likely going to change,
but even right now, we're seeing information here
on our latest post, just on the dashboard area,
so this is the post that we just made,
it's already got two likes,
and we've got a direct link here
to go to the community tab to go and see that post.
But if we go over here under analytics,
then we choose engagement at the top.
Let's set this from 28 days to lifetime,
just so we have some more data in there,
and then if we come down here to top posts,
then we can see in here our top posts for that period,
or in this case, top posts ever.
We can choose polls, text and video posts as well,
and get some analytics around this.
Now, let's just say we go back to polls,
cause they're the ones that we're running most right now.
Let's choose see more,
then we can get a deeper dive
into those analytics in here as well.
Now, if we back out of this now
and go up to the content area,
and then we go up to posts at the top,
this is another dedicated area where we can dive in,
we can see all of our posts,
we can get some high level numbers here as well,
but we can also manage the posts from here too.
So we can edit them,
we can view the comments for those specific posts,
we can obviously click on them to go and view
those posts as well.
Now, in terms of which types of posts
are getting the most amount of engagement
and interaction on the platform right now,
whether it's text, whether it's an image or a GIf,
whether it's a poll or whether it's a YouTube video
that you're linking in those,
for us in all of our testing,
there is a clear winner and it's polls.
People love connecting and engaging
and answering a question and doing that through polls,
polls are working ridiculously well.
What we're even seeing is, there's a lot of people
that are answering and engaging in those polls
that aren't subscribed to our channel.
And it's not just us that are seeing results like this.
There's lots of other people that are posting around
how successful they've been running polls
as their community posts.
And this is something I was also talking about
with our YouTube partner manager,
and she's seen the same across
all of the different channels that she manages.
But what I found really interesting
with that as well is that the post
that performed the worst, got the least amount of reach,
engagement, comments, likes across the board,
was when we were posting a post
that included a YouTube video,
whether it was us linking to one of ours
or whether it was linking to someone else's.
Anytime we created a video or post or linked to a video,
those were the worst performing posts.
And this is another one that was validated
with our partner manager as well,
from everything that she's seen.
So polls are the clear standout right now,
but you can also get great results with images and GIFS too,
and even just writing a paragraph,
writing a story, sharing an update,
just as text, you can also do really well with.
But I think the reason that polls do so well
is because they're simple interaction,
as humans we like answering questions,
we see a question as a poll,
all we have to do is tap one of the answers and we're done,
we can then keep scrolling through.
It's simple, it's fast,
and it's also a little rewarding as well.
But again, this interaction no matter how big or small
is still interaction with your channel
which can definitely help it grow.
So now you know all about YouTube community posts.
Now, if you're serious about growing on YouTube
and you don't wanna make a lot of the mistakes
that we made growing our channel
to over a million subscribers,
then you won't wanna miss the video
that is linked on screen now,
where we share the biggest mistakes that we made,
the things that slowed us up,
so now you don't need to make the same mistakes,
and you can grow faster.
Definitely check out that video
and I will see you in the next one.