Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the YouTube comments section, which is famous for its seemingly endless assortment of unsavory characters claiming “First!” post or bashing a video just to elicit a reaction from other viewers or the video’s creator. Seeing their comments section regress into an episode of Jerry Springer is every brand’s nightmare. Today, we’d like to provide some tried and true options in how to deal with YouTube trolls:

Faced with the prospect of dealing with illicit commenters, many brands and agencies choose to simply disable YouTube comments rather than playing moderator and dealing with the mess. This, however, is an enormous mistake! Engagement (and especially commenting) is factored heavily in whether your video appears in YouTube Search and Related Videos – if you block YouTube comments you will limit the viral potential of your video and cripple your SEO. In fact, there’s a direct correlation between videos that receive engagement from the owner of the video and views, as well as whether that video is likely to receive additional engagement in the future.

More YouTube comments and more engagement results in more views, more subscribers, more comments, and more engagement

Probably the most obvious lesson that the owners of Amy’s Baking Company chose to ignore is the old Internet adage “don’t feed the trolls!” Ignoring a troll is a troll’s kryptonite – as a YouTube creator you should always err on taking the high road and staying out of a good ol’ fashioned flame war. Instead, focus your efforts on the commenters that matter. Identify influential viewers by looking into which commenters have the highest number of subscribers, and then respond to those users. These “influencers” are your most important viewers, and unlike trolls (who usually don’t have many subscribers) are actually worth your time! Many partnerships and cross promotional agreements between channels have been forged within the YouTube comments section, resulting in thousands or even millions of views.

Sort your YouTube comments by reputation and commenter influence with vidIQ

Instead of responding negatively to your audience, if you’re going to respond at all try being positive! A perfect example of this in practice can be found in the video Low Calorie Chicken Wraps Recipe by the culinary masters over at Being Fat Sucks. In a previous video, a viewer commented that one of the hosts had an uncanny resemblance to our good friend Severus Snape from Harry Potter. The comment snowballed into a frenzy, and every video with the Snape-ish looking host was spammed with YouTube comments about his appearance. Rather than responding negatively, the creators acknowledged their audience by having the host dress up as Snape in their next video. And guess what, their audience loved it!

Believe it or not, YouTube is a social network. In fact, it’s now the 3rd largest in the world (behind Facebook and Google+)! Adopting Social Media Best Practices will go a long way in setting the tone for your YouTube comments and creating an amazing community around your content. By rewarding constructive commenters with thoughtful responses you’ll create an environment that fosters positivity rather than thrives off the negativity that trolls love. Home Depot is a great example of a company that has done this extremely well. In the example below, a viewer expressed his frustration that Home Depot didn’t provide a link to the second part of the video. Home Depot acknowledged the commenter and replied immediately, currying the favor of their audience and increasing engagement.

Home Depot YouTube comments are an example of the best YouTube comments you can make as a brand

Know of another technique to successfully stymie YouTube trolls? Respond in the comments section below!

Woman meditating in yoga pose near waterfall surrounded by lush forest nature.

If there’s one thing that the Amy’s Baking Company PR trainwreck proved, it’s that trolls are legion.

A Lesson In YouTube Comments: Stay Calm, Keep Them On!

Trying to keep up with your YouTube channel’s comments and engage with your community can seem like an uphill battle.

To the brands that have pleaded with us to make their lives easier by building YouTube comment moderation and YouTube management tools to satisfy their needs; we hear you! This has been a huge area of focus for us, and we’re making our YouTube tools better every day. Here are some of our powerful features that are making YouTube comment management less of a headache for the enterprise:

No community manager has enough time to respond to every YouTube comment made on a popular video – community managers want a simple way to find their best YouTube comments by the viewer who has the most subscribers. To solve this, vidIQ allows you to sort your YouTube comments by reputation in order to discover and engage with your most influential viewers – these viewers are what we at vidIQ refer to as your Top Influencers. These top YouTube viewers are the ones who you want to connect with and encourage to evangelize your video.

Don't try to respond to every YouTube comment – sort your YouTube comments by reputation and only respond to influential viewers

vidIQ offers advanced comment sorting capabilities that allow you to narrow down your YouTube comments to a specific time period. Rather than having to visit each individual video’s page, vidIQ takes the tedium out of YouTube comment moderation by allowing you to view all of your most recent comments across all of your videos in one convenient location, saving you time.

Some of the best YouTube marketers we’ve encountered prefer to reply to comments from a personal channel vs. their brand’s channel in order to reveal the human behind the brand and prevent their brand from engaging in distracting conversations. With vidIQ you can reply to comments from another YouTube account, making YouTube play nice with large brands.

Although YouTube already supports threaded / nested comments (which Facebook just introduced for Pages), they don’t provide you with the ability to easily find every comment a viewer has made or a viewer’s YouTube comment history. We do. Knowing the context of a viewers’ comment and whether or not you’ve had other interactions with that user in the past is critical, especially if you have more than one community manager.

See all YouTube comments by a specific user to see the user's comment history

Introducing Real Time YouTube Comment Moderation

No longer will you need to wait for a YouTube comment notification email to arrive – manage and respond to your YouTube comments in one place with vidIQ’s live comment dashboard.

YouTube real time YouTube comment moderation tool

To learn more about these features and others, visit vidIQ and grow your YouTube audience today!"

Dashboard showing 1,439 synced new comments under the Comments tab for social media monitoring

To further enable our users to build a community around their content, we recently announced Real Time Updates, which will allow you to use vidIQ’s advanced YouTube comment moderation tools to manage and grow your YouTube audience on a split-second basis.

YouTube Tips for Creators

A Lesson In YouTube Comments: Stay Calm, Keep Them On!

How To: Moderate Your YouTube Comments Like a Pro