The YouTube Community tab.
Ever heard of it?
Well if you haven't you will do soon as it's about to become one of the most powerful ways
to reach your audience and here's everything you need to know about it.
Welcome back to vidIQ everyone, my name is Rob.
If this is your first time here we are the Youtube tool and service that aims to get
you more views in less time.
Our tool is free to download, a link is in the description and while you're at subscribe
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new content.
Today's topic is the Youtube community tab.
It's been around in some form for years but it's just undergone a massive overhaul and
is now available to a lot more video creators so lets jump in.
No expense spared there in vidIQ special effects department.
So the community tab can be found on your channel page on desktop browsers.
As of time of recording this video, the feature has been rolled out to channels with more
than 10,000 subscribers.
The community tab is effectively a social media timeline for YouTube, much like facebook
or twitter.
You can post status updates...
You can post your latest videos...
You can post voting polls...
And you can even post pictures.
These post all act like YouTube comments.
You can like or dislike and love the comment but you can't pin it.
You can reply to comments though and we're delighted to tell you that our comment template
tool works on this page so you can quickly insert stock replies if you need to.
And one last thing, the community tab will moderate spam comments as well so on the face
of things it does look like another comment manager page, to really see the impact of
the community tab, we need to jump onto a mobile device.
This is getting ridiculous now.
Within the youtube mobile app your community tab will appear on your channel and it works
in pretty much the same way it does on your desktop.
You can post new things to the time as well as read comments and respond to them.
Now again, nothing too fancy here, if all this content were to stay in the community
tab on a channel page no one would see it, the good news is, it goes somewhere else too.
So now I'm logged into another account that is subscribed to vidIQ so if I check my subscription
feed I will see all the usual videos but what I also see is this post from vidIQ.
As a viewer of this post I can reply it like I would do any other post on YouTube.
So now you can see the power of community posts, they have the potential to reach all
of your subscribers.
I say potential because subscribers can turn off these community posts if they scroll to
the top of their subscriptions page, tap the videos and posts button and switch to videos
only.
Now to get a measure of the potential reach.
I posted this comment when I first started making this video.
Three hours later it has loads of likes and lots of responses.
I found that voting polls in particular are super popular especially if they relate to
your content and you can use community post to remind subscribers of older videos that
you think might be of some value.
However, there's two things to consider.
Youtube is not Facebook or twitter.
People come to watch videos not swipe through endless status updates, pictures and voting
polls so my recommendation is to post no more than once a day!
You do run the risk of those subscribers turning off your posts or, at worst, unsubscribing
from you completely.
Second point, up until now community posts have only been available to a select few youtubers,
now it's open to everyone with over 10k subscribers so you may end up with timelines that look
like this: completely flooded with these community posts.
So it's unclear the power of these posts from now on and whether youtube will need to refine
things to stop this from happening.
One more thing to mention these community posts can appear as mobile notifications so
again that has both its pro and cons.
And that's everything you need to know about YouTube's community posts, I would love to
hear your thoughts on whether you are going to use it and what impact it might have on
YouTube, enjoy the rest of your video making day.
Bye for now.
Another day done time to go for a dip.