- So, recently millions of creators across YouTube
unlocked some really powerful features.
However,
it's very easy to ignore these features
if you're not paying attention
and that my friends would be a massive missed opportunity.
What's worse is that if you know about these tools
and you use them inappropriately,
it could end up being just a complete waste of your time.
Specifically,
we're gonna talk about the YouTube community tab today,
as well as another community feature that is very powerful
and yet under utilized.
And talk about how you can make sure
you're not using them the wrong way.
These tools have the potential
to reach hundreds of thousands of people across YouTube.
People who may have never even seen a video of yours before.
So let's start with the community tab,
which if you don't know,
is basically a social media feed built straight
into the YouTube platform.
It can be used to post images, GIFs, polls, and even videos.
And the first big mistake that you can make with this tool
is not appreciating its existence in the first place.
For example, if you are currently under 500 subscribers,
you don't yet have access,
however, you should absolutely be preparing to get access
to this tool right now,
what I suggest is preparing content on your way
to 500 subscribers, take stills from videos.
Think of interesting questions that you could ask
your audience and build out a folder
of future community tab posts on your computer somewhere.
Because once you unlock the community tab on YouTube,
you're likely gonna want to post daily.
And we'll get to more on that in a bit.
Before we get there,
let's talk a little bit about another mistake,
a lot of channels make,
and that is treating the community tab
as just another social media feed.
I can't stress enough the importance of catering
your community posts to your audience,
just like you would any other video.
If for example, you have a travel channel,
you could post a poll about different cities
that your viewers would wanna visit.
You could even share some images from videos of cool places
that you went.
If you're a cooking channel,
you could ask your viewers about
their favorite types of food,
and questions like these can help you
generate new content ideas.
But what you don't wanna do is make a habit of posting
very personal updates that really have nothing to do with
your content.
Going back to the cooking channel example.
There are right ways and wrong ways to update your audience
about certain things.
What I wouldn't suggest is a generic behind the scenes post
of you sitting at your computer editing your next video.
I wouldn't share things like pictures
from your kid's graduation.
And I definitely wouldn't post any apologies about how
you're not able to upload this week.
On their own posts like
this just aren't really relevant to your wider audience.
However,
there is a bit of a twist that you can put
on all of those ideas.
If you would like to show behind the scenes content,
show what your kitchen looks like
after you get done shooting a video.
If you're going to your kid's graduation,
take some pictures of the food at the graduation party,
or if your next upload isn't gonna happen this week,
maybe post a picture of you screaming at your empty pantry
and ask your audience.
"Hey, have you ever forgotten a very crucial ingredient
when you were at the store?"
Whatever your approach,
just like the videos you put out on your channel,
your posts need to be just as relevant
to that same audience.
So we've talked about some different types
of community posts that you could put out there
and how that could be relevant to your audience.
But one thing we haven't touched on is if and when
you should actually promote your videos
on the community tab.
I would say personally,
it's gonna be a big mistake to use your community tab,
to simply dump links to past videos.
Each of those posts are a piece of content on their own,
and they should provide value to your audience.
It's certainly okay to link to videos every so often,
but I can assure you that just posting a video
is going to get you less engagement.
When you promote a video,
try pairing it with a poll or an image
and ask a compelling question.
And really quick, that brings me to my next mistake,
which is using the video button.
I'll keep this one simple, don't use it.
This button lets you grab any video on your channel
or any video on any part of YouTube
and put it in its very own post.
However, we have tested this
and we've heard from other creators as well
that generally speaking,
these just don't get any interactions.
We suspect that these videos show up too similar
to any other video on YouTube, especially on mobile.
And so it doesn't really look like a community post.
And that's the reason community posts are so powerful
because they interrupt your scroll.
They look totally different than what you're used to seeing
on YouTube.
Anyway, going back to something I said earlier,
I mentioned how you might wanna post daily.
So let's talk about posting frequency on the community tab.
My recommendation is to post at least once a day,
if you can.
Posting too much more than that
causes your own community post to kind of compete
for space with each other,
and you don't really need that.
But if you're posting infrequently, now you're just missing
on all these great opportunities
to reach all these new people.
My method for this has been to swap between a poll
and an image post one after another,
every single day.
And then text posts are also something you can do.
And what's cool about those is that
if you keep them really short,
the text appears big and bold while people
are scrolling on mobile.
And daily posts might sound like a lot,
but keep in mind, you also have access to a scheduling tool.
So my advice here would be to take one day a week
and schedule out a whole bunch of content
for the following week.
And that is why it's so important
to plan out your posts ahead of time.
As you're editing videos,
always be thinking of things that you can be putting
on the community tab.
And again,
this includes people who don't have access to it yet,
and that was the community tab,
but there's another feature you unlock at 500 subscribers
that I would say is rather underutilized.
In video titles and descriptions,
you are actually able to mention a fellow creator.
Now what this mentioned does is actually highlights
the name of the creator when you start typing
the @ symbol and then the creator's name.
And this also sends that creator a notification
that somebody mentioned them in a title
or a description of a recent video.
Now why bring this up?
Well, if you happen to be a reaction channel, for example,
and you're doing a reaction on another creator's video,
you may wanna tag that creator because this could open
the door to an interaction with them
that you may not have otherwise had.
And the same goes for if you're collaborating
with another creator,
tagging their channel in your channel description
will help people more easily find them.
And again,
the notification goes out to the creator.
And now if you're sitting there thinking great,
now I just need to figure out how to get 500 subscribers,
then I would like you to watch this video next,
because it's going to help you get your videos recommended
more often.