- Okay, so, literally millions of YouTube channels
are about to gain access to a tool here on YouTube
that could earn their channels
hundreds of thousands of impressions,
and that means getting yourself in front of people
you never were able to reach before.
Now, I'm talking, of course,
about the YouTube Community tab.
And YouTube just dropped a huge announcement
just a little while ago.
"Community posts are coming to millions more channels!
Starting October 12th,
we're lowering the eligibility threshold
for Community posts to channels with 500+ subscribers."
And if that wasn't enough,
YouTube goes on to say, "For channels under 500 subscribers,
we're working to bring Community posts to you
in the future."
Personally, I've always wondered why the Community tab
was locked behind this 1,000-subscriber threshold,
we've had it for a very long time now.
So, I wasn't really expecting this announcement,
but I'm really, really excited.
I'm excited for all of you.
And if you're not excited right now,
I want to explain why this is so huge.
Given everything we've learned about the Community tab
just in the last year or so,
I'm surprised at how underutilized it is,
channel after channel that we see.
People are just not really utilizing this feature
when they gain access to it.
Those who are, though,
and let our channel be proof of this,
can reach tens of thousands of people on any given post,
depending on what it is you're doing.
At vidIQ, we actually use the Community tab
almost every day,
and one of the greatest examples is our latest post here.
As soon as we learned YouTube was unlocking this feature,
we posted about it in our Community tab.
And at the time of recording,
we already have over 300, almost 400 likes,
and 100 comments.
We use the Community tab
to share in the success of our channel
and that invites people to leave their own comments
and share their own success.
We use it to promote episodes of our podcast.
This Community tab is especially powerful on mobile,
where as you're scrolling through videos, normally,
different channels that you've checked out in the past,
maybe you're subscribed to them, maybe you're not,
could end up interrupting your scroll
as they pop up with different polls
that you can interact with,
or images, behind the scenes photos
of videos they're working on.
From our own testing here at vidIQ,
one thing we've learned about the Community tab
is that the more engaging you are,
the more you're contributing to the overall conversation,
depending on the types of things you've covered,
there's always something to talk about, right?
The more you do that,
the more engagement,
the more impression that your posts end up getting.
If you're offering valuable information
or thought-provoking questions,
those posts tend to get a lot of interactions.
And just like a video,
there is an algorithm built in
that tries to push this post in front of people
who may also want to interact with it,
whether they've heard of you or not.
And thanks to an update just a little while back,
YouTube has added Analytics to Community tab posts,
which is how we know that in the last 28 days,
we've gotten over half a million of impressions
on our community posts, over 20,000 likes,
and we know the overall percentage
of the like rate of our post is 2.3%.
Just like with video content,
we can dig in to this data
and try and determine the posts
that tend to get the most interaction.
While the Community tab is a great place
to post personal updates
about what's going on on your channel and life in general,
I think a lot of people really miss the mark
and don't post enough about things
that are of interest to their community.
So, if you're a channel with 500 subscribers
or you're approaching that number soon,
here's what I want you to do.
As soon as you unlock the Community tab,
your very first post should be something of value,
something that would be of value to your specific community.
I'll give you a quick example.
Let's say you collect Pokemon cards
and you've a whole YouTube channel about it.
Are the cards being restocked in store soon?
And can you share that information with your audience?
The next day, you could post a poll
that asks people how much
their rarest Pokemon card is worth,
and maybe the last option invites them
to leave a more specific number
and description in the comments.
If you're a baking channel,
you could post a poll about different recipes
that people are experimenting with.
What are you gonna make for Halloween?
And the choices could be:
cookies, cake, or I'm just gonna eat a bowl of candy.
The most important thing, though, is to be creative,
have fun with it,
and make sure that the majority of your posts
relate in some way to your audience.
And again, if you want an example of this,
visit our Community tab here on the vidIQ channel,
we're doing this all the time.
We use it, again, almost every day.
If you're a channel
that's about to unlock the Community tab on October 12th,
let me know in the comments down below
how you plan to use it for your first post.
And if you wanna learn more
about how to use the Community tab,
we have a whole video on it right here.
Be sure to check that out.