- This channel is appearing of the top of our home feed,
and I haven't even watched one of their videos.
(upbeat music)
Hey folks, I'm Rob.
Welcome back to vidIQ and let me paint
a perfect scenario for your YouTube channel.
What if you could reach your regular audience
with more content on a far more consistent basis,
maybe even multiple times a day,
as well as touching a massive brand new audience,
which could become valuable members of your community,
and it only takes two or three minutes of your time?
Yes, we're talking about the community tab.
But don't stop this video,
because I want to show you something phenomenal.
Recently, during one of our Q&A livestreams,
which are every Wednesday if he wants to join us,
by the way,
The Chess Geek asked us
about how important using the community tab is.
And of course we said, it's very important.
And the conversation ended up
with us looking at his community tab every single day.
I'll actually bring up Chess Geek's community tab here.
And it looks as if you're using it
on a regular basis already, which is fantastic.
And Dan he's following the same tactic as you
of having you know,
who your favorite chess streamer is,
but then also over comment below
to add even more engagement.
I've just voted on over.
- Make it a comment.
- Yeah.
Who do I?
I'd put Kasparov but I don't have to spell his name.
So I'm going to put Deep Blue.
That was the computer chess machine, wasn't it,
from a while ago.
There you are, you've got a comment from it as well.
So no doubt what's going to happen
is that we're going to get loads of chess community posts
over the next week now, on our feed.
Now, of course, I said all of that
a little bit tongue in cheek.
Well, have a guess what happened
less than 24 hours later.
The morning following that live stream,
this was my home feed on a YouTube mobile app:
an advert at the top as always,
breaking news, story shelf,
a couple of videos, the short shelf, and then boom.
A community post from Chess Geek from two hours ago.
And look at how much real estate
this image is taking up on my screen.
Think of a potential impact that this has
on a YouTube user.
That is pretty cool, right?
And remember this:
this channel is appearing at the top of our home feed.
And I haven't even watched one of their videos.
Presumably, because I engaged with a voting poll
from that channel,
which probably took the creator two minutes to create,
now YouTube thinks I have an interest in chess,
at least for the next couple of days.
This wasn't just a one off fluke.
Over the next few days.
I did see multiple community posts from Chess Geek,
although admittedly, I did need to scroll down
quite a bit in my feed to find 'em all.
What is also interesting
is that I haven't yet seen a video from this channel,
only community posts.
Now regular viewers here at vidIQ will know
that I try to avoid the conversation
of how to beat the algorithm,
because I encourage you to focus on building an audience.
But this community tab does bring in
an interesting curve ball.
It appears as if, at least at a very superficial level,
there is an independent YouTube
community posts algorithm at play.
And if a YouTube user engages with that,
then they're just as likely to see more community posts
as they are videos from channels.
And we all know what takes a lot longer to create.
So I'm not going to stand here and claim
that more community posts leads to directly more views.
But what I will suggest is that the community tab
does lead to a lot more exposure
for your channel as a whole,
which could indirectly lead to more views.
Let me give you a recent example of what I mean.
We recently made a video
about YouTube potentially hiding or removing dislikes,
in which we told you all to dislike the video.
I didn't realize people would actually do that.
But anyway, so far the video has a respectable 16,000 views.
Now, then in the community tab,
I reposted YouTube tweets on the topic,
and asked for reaction.
That generated around 3000 engagements
in likes and comments.
However, even more impressive was the voting poll,
which brought in the same number of engagements.
But on top of this 23,000 votes.
All of this from one sentence and two emojis.
Now I'm the first to admit
that this is not an apples to apples comparison.
But let's have some fun with this.
We can see all of the impressions
and click through data from YouTube
on the video we made on the topic.
But what if we try to do the same thing
for the community post?
Let's convert those views into votes,
and turn the click through rate into votes through rate,
and calculate what the impressions count could be.
Now again, let me stress visa somewhat made up numbers.
But they are extrapolated from fact.
I have no doubt that at least 100,000 YouTube users
are seeing this voting poll.
And I know that at least 20,000 have engaged with it.
The simple truth is,
the YouTube homepage that hundreds of millions of users
open up every single day,
is turning into a social media feed.
And with that being said,
it is so much easier for a YouTube user
to engage with a community post,
be it through a vote or responding to a question,
then committing to several minutes,
if not more of a video.
Does that mean then that the community tab
is potentially overpowered?
Yeah, it probably means it is.
But if you have 1000 subscribers,
you have every right to use it.
And you should.
What I will say is that the community tab
is not a one hit fix..
You have to somewhat ironically cultivate a community
within your community tab.
Try to get into a pattern of posting at least once a day.
Do something fun, something intriguing.
Get them to engage with your content.
Don't just try to push them to your video content,
because essentially you're asking them to watch a video,
which is what YouTube does with recommendations anyway.
As with pretty much everything on YouTube, provide value.
As for the Spiffing Brits
and his weird and wonderful adventures
into the community tab,
what I'm simply going to do is point you
in the direction of that video, which is over here,
but also offer you an alternative viewpoint
from Little Monster Media, which is down there.
All I'm suggesting to you,
is you start using that community tab
if you have 1000 subscribers.
Enjoy the rest of your video making day.