Have you ever wished the YouTube Studio had a dashboard just for the Community Tab? Perhaps a panel showing how many likes and comments your posts have earned?
YouTube seems to agree, and as a result, a new page to do all that and more has appeared in the YouTube Studio. Here’s how it works.
For real-time guidance, watch our video tutorial on how to find and use this new section of YouTube:
This list of community posts is in chronological order by default, but the columns are sortable. If you want to know something specific, such as which community posts have the most comments or likes, you can easily shuffle through the data.
We did some exploring and discovered some interesting things about vidIQ's community posts, such as:
There are various types of content you can post on the community tab, including images, videos, polls, plain text messages, and animated GIFs.
When you’re browsing the community posts page, these content types will appear in different ways. Plain text posts display an alphabet symbol, ‘Aa’, to quickly represent non-media messages. Any post with an image or video will be shown with the image it comes with, while voting polls are displayed with three blue horizontal lines.
If you mouse over each community post, you’ll notice a drop-down menu with more options for managing the feature. The first one lets you edit a post directly from the YouTube Studio, which is pretty cool. You can also manage and respond to comments or click a link to take you to the original community post on YouTube.
One thing to keep in mind, however, is that you can’t edit polls. This is probably a safeguard to stop creators from changing the answer choices once voting begins.
Lastly, there’s an option to filter community posts. This lets you view only the posts you want to see, such as plain text or animated GIFs. You can even filter the posts to see which ones have been published or scheduled for future publication.
We at vidIQ are strong supporters of the YouTube community tab. For years, it's helped creators stay in touch with their audience, especially when only one or two videos are published each week. Our only complaint, and it’s a pretty big one, would be the fact that creators need 1,000 subscribers to access these amazing community tools.
But if you're lucky enough to have a community tab on your channel, start using it! Challenge yourself to post something every day for the next three to six months - polls, animated GIFs, or anything that brings you closer to your audience.
Lydia Sweatt is a writer who loves balancing her article/blog time indoors with a healthy dose of nature. She bikes, hikes, and identifies edible plants along the way.
