YouTube Community Helps Creators Engage With Subscribers

YouTube Community is here and it builds out the video-sharing platform in the way Venture Beat reported last month. The new tab helps creators share non-video content with their subscribers right on their channel page. The new Community tab was developed in collaboration with and from feedback provided by many of YouTube’s top influencers. While technically in beta, the Community tab is now in use by a few dozen key YouTubers and their millions of subscribers.

The stated goal of the Community tab is to let users share live streams, animated and still images, text, and more with their audience. Kiley McEvoy, senior product manager at YouTube notes on the YouTube Creator Blog that Community provides “easier, lightweight ways to engage with fans more often in between uploads, in real time.”

In turn, subscribers can interact with the content in the traditional ways seen on YouTube: thumbs up, thumbs down or comments. They can also get notifications when their favorite YouTubers post something new. Moderation options are also available and reports suggest more interactive elements like polling will be coming soon.

The Community tab may seem a small addition but it continues the social media land grab we have seen this year. Platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter keep chipping away at their format commitments to become multipurpose social channels. Adding more content types can help keep audiences engaged in one place and creators welcome this change. This consolidation reduces the strain on creators to generate unique content for channels with different purposes or content types.

YouTube Community Will Help With Engagement

Community beta tester channels include popular YouTubers like The Game Theorists, Karmin, Lilly Singh, Peter Hollens, John & Hank Green, Sam Tsui, and VSauce. While that’s a small number of users, their reach means that tens of millions of subscribers are already engaging with the Community features.

MatPat of The Game Theorists posted a question for his audience without a video, and he got 17,000 responses in two days.

Vsauce posted his take on how to use Community already, “TL;DW Community, to me, is a place where I can share videos I enjoy from other Creators. It helps promote great content in an effective and fun way.” Of course, he also recorded a video about it…on one of his other channels.

Photo Credit: Sam Tsui