The YouTube homepage is turning into a social media feed. Open the mobile app, and you’ll see that in addition to videos, there are extra posts from creators you’re subscribed to. These may be:

. They’re not just on the homepage of the app; you can also find them on a channel’s Community tab.

If you’ve passed 1,000 subscribers, you have access to the Community tab and its channel-boosting magic. As often as possible, you should use it to connect with viewers and increase your channel’s exposure.

How to Use The Community tab in YouTube Studio

Consider this, for example. What if you could reach your core audience multiple times a day without posting a video – only polls, GIFs, and text? What if your next poll gets 50,000 votes because YouTube’s algorithm promotes it across the app?

That’s what’s happening right now. Our vidIQ polls receive a jaw-dropping number of votes. The exposure introduces our channel to thousands of viewers we’ve never reached on YouTube.

Can the same thing happen to you? Absolutely.

Reaching a New Audience With YouTube Community Posts

Every Wednesday, we host a live stream on the vidIQ channel. One of our viewers, the 

, asked an important question during the Q&A session: 

Should creators use the Community tab and how does it affect channel growth?

“Yes” was our answer. To prove it, we voted on one of ChessGeek’s polls. Our theory was that, when someone engages with a Community post, they’ll see more posts from that channel.

Guess what happened less than 24 hours later? The morning following that live stream, a Community post from the ChessGeek was on our homepage. It nearly covered the entire screen.

Days later, we saw more Community posts from this creator – and we never watched a single video of theirs.

So we proved our theory. On YouTube, it’s possible to:

Encourage the algorithm to show more posts to that viewer.

Watch our video below for more examples of how the Community tab fuels your growth:

Does the Community Tab Have Its Own Algorithm?

Beating the YouTube algorithm is something we’d never encourage you to do. It’s virtually impossible, and there are better things to focus on. Building an audience is more rewarding than chasing dozens of viral videos.

Still, we’re curious about the algorithm behind YouTube’s Community posts. Is it a separate algorithm or is it the same one that recommends videos to viewers? It feels like there’s an independent algorithm for both.

"At this point, every creator with more than 1,000 subscribers should be posting something on their Community tab." – vidIQ

But if that’s true, it means a user is just as likely to see Community posts as they are videos. And we know which one takes longer to create. You can spend two minutes crafting a Community post. Videos take hours.

We’re not going to say Community posts will get you more views. But we can’t deny that the exposure could lead to more views and subscribers for your channel. At this point, every creator with more than 1,000 subscribers should be posting 

Videos and Community posts are very different, but they both have their place on YouTube. That’s why it’s smart to post each type on your channel. If you’re making videos while never posting on the Community tab, you’ll miss a chance to connect with viewers. In fact, sometimes Community posts get 

For example, we posted a Community poll about whether YouTube should hide dislikes on videos. A whopping 29,000 people voted. There were hundreds of comments and more than 2,000 likes. 

We received all this by posting one question and two emojis.

Engaging with a Community post is simple. It often takes one tap. With a video, viewers have to watch for several minutes before seeing something they can comment on – if they comment at all.

To get the most engagement from your Community posts, be sure to:

Never over-promote your videos; that’s what YouTube recommendations are for.

If you’re doing polls, let one of the answer choices be “Other - Comment Below.” That should help you get more comments.

As with anything on YouTube, provide value.

Connecting with your audience helps you grow your YouTube channel. Before you do that on any other platform, learn 

Have you passed 1,000 YouTube subscribers? You can gain even more by posting on the Community tab. Keep reading to learn how.

YouTube Community Tab: The Underrated Growth Tool You NEED to Use

YouTube Stories are an incredible way to connect with your community, but did you also know the feature can be absolutely invaluable when it comes to managing any kind of negative feedback?

As a YouTuber, creating content that is authentic to your brand can feel not only stressful but precarious. The task of being true to yourself and original while constantly watching everything you say is a difficult one.

Many YouTubers have had unintentional PR blunders, but successful creators take proper and prompt action to mitigate them. Accidents happen, but here’s how YouTube’s Story feature can help with audience retention after social backlash from viewers.

How YouTube Stories Help You Connect to Your Community

YouTube stories are clips that last for 15 seconds and expire after 7 days. It is a mobile-only feature which is beneficial since 

70% of YouTube views come from mobile devices

. As soon as a subscriber accesses your channel or opens the YouTube app, they can immediately see your Story, which makes the feature a casual and quick way for content creators to connect to their audiences without taking the time to create a video.

YouTube Stories is such a powerful tool for building community engagement that vidIQ highlighted the feature earlier this year:

Between scripting, editing, filming, audio mixing, and more, 

the average time it takes to make a video is 7 hours

. This may seem like a short period of time, but the social backlash ball rolls quickly, and therefore, it is very important to act quickly. Typically, the best apologies are those that are 

short, sweet, unscripted, and offer no excuses

 for public speaking expert, Jahan Kalantar’s, steps to making an authentic apology.

YouTube’s Story feature can be used to speedily aid in the process of re-establishing trust while reducing time spent on the issue.

Typically, the longer you wait to respond, the more tarnished your public image as a YouTuber can become. YouTube’s story feature is a quick way to ease tensions before they gain momentum or possibly even result in the loss of viewership.

Because viewers can see your Story on their home feed, they may even see your Story before they see any content that is causing a fuss.

Although YouTube has removed its direct messaging feature, you can still reconnect with your viewers in a personal way by posting an impromptu Story. While fans and viewers can comment on your Story through the feature, you can also respond directly to fans with a photo or video that will be viewable by the entire community.

Although YouTube Stories are typically unprepared and spontaneous, the feature affords content creators an unscripted and immediate way to reconnect with viewers.

 then make sure to download vidIQ. Over 1 million creators use vidIQ to help with keyword and competitor research, channel audits, and so much more. 

If you’re serious about growing your YouTube views and subscribers, sign up for exclusive access to the 

. Learn how to launch a successful YouTube Channel in just 30 days.

YouTube Stories is a fantastic tool for helping creators communicate directly to subscribers. Find out how it can be your greatest public relations asset too.

YouTube Stories: The Best Way to Quickly Engage With Your Subscribers

When you look at the big YouTube channels, there's one thing that they all have in common. They all have an amazing community or fan base. That means that as soon as a new video is launched their fans are the first to comment or the first to watch or the first to share. You have to focus on building up your community if you stand any chance of success on YouTube.

The mistake that a lot of us make is that we only use the tools that YouTube provides. In other words, we use the 

, or we reply to comments, and that's pretty much it. So today we're going to focus on using multiple tools to build a communication channel between you and your audience because that is how you grow your own YouTube channel.

So, how do you build that one on one relationship and engagement with your audience? I put that question to 

, Growth Marketer at for Mark Cuban’s group of companies. Now you all know Mark Cuban - he’s a venture capitalist, and he's also one of the sharks on an amazing show called ‘Shark Tank’, where he invests in certain companies that he believes in. But once the show is over, once the due diligence has been done, and once Mark and his team really get to grips with that company to help them grow, QuHarrison steps in and helps with those communications, helps with their strategy, helps with their growth.

Now QuHarrison himself has been a founder of several companies, especially in the high tech space, from an advertising agency, specializing in marketing to millennials, to a healthcare data exchange platform, the world's first digital art marketplace powered by blockchain, so plenty of experience in growth and community building. In this episode you will learn:

How to treat YouTube as a serious business so you get that return on investment

Why creators need to think of themselves as a brand

How to reach your audience where they are

The best tools to use to reach your YouTube community

Subscribe to TubeTalk: The Video Marketing Podcast!

TubeTalk has been informing video creators and marketers since 2014, and is one of the most respected and listened to podcasts in the online video industry. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode! You can find vidIQ's TubeTalk at:

How to Build an Engaged & Loyal YouTube Community: Full Transcript

Liron Segev:	QuHarrison, thank you for taking the time to be on Tube Talk.

Liron Segev: As content creators, we are out there, we're delivering our content, we're getting views, we're getting likes, we're getting subscribes, we're getting comments. Surely that's enough, no?

QuHarrison Terry:	I think it's enough for some, but if you're serious about this and you want to make this a full time job or a serious stream of revenue, you have to kind of treat it like a business. And in that regard, what business do you know that succeeds that doesn't serve their customers? And in serving your customers, you can't serve them if you don't talk to them, right? You have to talk and listen to them and then modify your product ideally, and now you have a business.

Liron Segev:	So, the two way communication. We're looking at it saying, "Okay, well we're behind the camera, we press record, we upload onto the platform, we're pretty much done. Maybe we'll do a bit of social media, but technically we're done." You're saying then, we're going about this the wrong way around?

QuHarrison Terry:	Yes, yes, yes. I'm thinking you created a product, but you only get a portion of what's really out there if you only look at the metrics that are given to you from a platform like YouTube, right?

A lot of those metrics are great for YouTube, and they could be great for you in certain situations, but in most situations they're not telling you the full picture. Like if someone came to your video and watched it just because they did a simple search, that doesn't mean they know your brand. That doesn't mean they know you, but it is an opportunity for them to get to know you. And how do you continue that conversation after they've watched or received the information they had?

Liron Segev:	Okay, so you've hit on a couple of very important key points here. So, first of all you mentioned they don't know your brand. Do you think that YouTubers, content creators as a whole, are maybe not thinking of themselves as being a brand?

QuHarrison Terry: I think at a later stage it becomes almost impossible to not see yourself as a brand. When you have 500,000 subscribers or a million subscribers, you're a brand. You're a household name in some places, right?

When you're just starting out, it's really hard to see yourself as a brand when it's just you and your friends at home, your family that check out your content, and so I think it's a perception that changes over time. But to answer your question, I think everyone should look at themselves as a brand if they want to not passively create content, but actively do it.

So if you're seriously just considering starting a channel or already have a channel and you're taking it serious in the sense of it's fun, it's just something you do in your past time but you enjoy it, then yes, it's a brand of some sorts, right? Even if you do it and this is like your full time gig, it's a brand, and you have to treat it almost as if it were a real brand. Whether that be a company, a business or an organization, because the brand is key.

Liron Segev:	Well, and the brand is you. I mean, at the end of the day it's your that's out there. And you want it to be top of mind when people think, "Hey, I need to have a good laugh today. I'm having a really bad day. Who's my favorite YouTuber?" You need to be that person, that destination. My toilet is clogged. Who do I go see? You know?

Liron Segev:	So being top of mind means essentially creating a brand. Do you advise content creators to think as a business even when they're small?

QuHarrison Terry:	Yes, yes, undoubtedly. I think that even in this conversation, when we talk about brands and what it means to be a brand or if you should consider yourself as a brand, that can be very daunting. Right?

I imagine if I were just trying to get content out the door, that might actually prevent me from creating content if I started to think about a brand and me as a brand and how that should function, because there's a lot of tough questions that you run into when you start to think of yourself as a brand.

So, the prerequisite I would put on the whole consideration of considering yourself as a brand would be think about it, but don't let it paralyze you. Acknowledge it, but don't let it be the end all.

Liron Segev:	Right. And not responding to the analysis paralysis. I need to get everything absolutely perfect, otherwise I'm never going to press that record button. Well, that's going to stop you from ever pressing the record button, right?

QuHarrison Terry:	Correct, because some of the people with the best brands don't make a lot of content. I mean, look at Beyonce. She's a great example. Beyonce doesn't run around always making content, following the nine tips you need to do on Instagram or YouTube to grow an audience, but she has an impeccable brand.

Now you can say she did a lot of things in a prior history or timeline before social media really existed, but the key point I'm trying to make here is a brand is something that co-exists alongside your efforts and actions.

She put definitely the time into becoming an artist and sharing her art, and that basically paid off dividends and turned into the massive brand that she has today.

Liron Segev:	And at the end of the day, it's still about the content. Even if you don't have everything nailed perfectly but it's still good content, people are going to watch.

Liron Segev:	You're going to build an audience because you're giving them value. You're giving them something for their time, which is awesome. All right, so that was the one point I wanted to pick up on the brand. Hey, communicate with your audience. Let's dive into that, because that is really impactful. I see a lot of content creators saying, "Okay, I've uploaded my video, I've uploaded to YouTube or to Instagram, whatever the platform may be. I've engaged with people in the comments. Well, I've done my job." Put a little tick box and move onto the next video. Are they wrong?

QuHarrison Terry:	No, they're not wrong. I mean, would you think they're wrong?

Liron Segev:	Well, I would think that there's different levels of communications based on different levels, right? But I do think that you can carry that conversation way beyond just a reply to a comment.

QuHarrison Terry:	I would totally agree with that. I think there's a lot of examples there, but for the people that commonly think about like what does communication on the platform and off the platform look like, I see so many people just default to email. The thing about that is I think it's the lazy way of communicating with your customers.

I've got an email newsletter and I've got a paid newsletter, right? I understand email and I cherish it as a channel, but I also do see how it is a lazy mechanism for people to talk with their customers, especially if you have a younger audience, right?

So one thing I would do is I would look at my YouTube data, and I would look at where do people, one, consume my content? If people are consuming my content and watching my videos on mobile, well that's a great metric. I probably would much rather show up in an iMessage, a text message, a Slack or Discord.

If you're consuming me on desktop, then maybe something like a survey or an email or a Chatbot experience might work better. Right? And I think to your broader point with there being levels to the dialogue at which you can converse with your viewers, I would say there's some good examples out there already.

When I watch Jared Polin's videos, Fro Knows Photo, he's a YouTuber, he makes a lot of content breaking down the schematics of cameras and how they intertwine into a creator's life, and he gives a lot of how-to guides, a lot of actions. He's the guy I go to when I want to know all the settings on a device related to photography and videography. His channel is very unique, because he's got over a million subs. He can't really respond to all the comments because of just the volume.

And with that being known, what he's done is he's built some pretty interesting funnels. He sends everyone back, for the most part, to froknowsphoto.com, and then there's different offers for different people. So he has the email newsletter, he has the discount if you just want something right then and there. He has a tutorials, of course. He even has courses, right?

I think that ecosystem that he's built is very much a heavy lift. If someone were to start today and they were just getting started, I would not say, "Go make froknowsphoto.com," but I would say definitely learn from it, right? And just say, "Hey, I really like how he sends everyone to this one destination. And that destination can be a plethora of things, but the one thing you do need to do is get information from the viewer. Whether that be a name, an email, a phone number, and then you need to continue that conversation."

Liron Segev:	And the most important thing here is owning that relationship.

Liron Segev:	The one thing that, as much as we love YouTube, at the end of the day we only have a subscriber, name, and a number, and it's not a telephone number, it's just a number of subscribers. If we want to send out a message to say, "Hey, we're going live tomorrow," there really isn't a way to do that. You're relying on YouTube notifications for all of those.

What he is doing is very smart. He's owning the relationships by building up a mailing list, by building up a call list, by getting people to opt in. That is actually absolute gold. Content creators of smaller sizes could maybe not do everything, but maybe they should focus on building up one channel of communication, give away something, give away a free ebook. Maybe is that a good place to start?

QuHarrison Terry:	Yeah, totally. Even if you've given away time. It's not scalable, but if I were starting off and you are inspiring or helping people, make yourself available, even if it's just 30 minutes a day, and you can pick the channel.

I've seen people do lives on Twitter and Instagram. I've seen people do things on LinkedIn. I've seen people do things via email, right? I mean even Gary Vee, you've seen him just give away his phone number. He's like, "Shoot me a text message."

Liron Segev:	How simple is it to pick up your phone and say, "Okay, go live on Instagram," and say, "I'm going to answer your questions for the next 30 minutes. Come and hang out."

QuHarrison Terry:	Right, and the first initial sessions are probably going to be quite dry, there's not going to be a lot of people.

Liron Segev:	But that's a good thing though. You can practice.

QuHarrison Terry:	It's true. That's true.

Liron Segev:	Do you find that YouTubers as they start to grow and build, they're realizing that, "Hold on, this stuff costs money. I need to be able to fund this somehow."

QuHarrison Terry:	Totally. Totally. Because your time is money, right? It's the one thing that's not scalable. A lot of people trade hours for money, and that's like their job, right? And some people are YouTube creators and they can create content, and they put a lot of time into their content, and then they trade that content for monetization of some type, whether it be a brand deal, whether it be advertising or affiliate dollars. And knowing that your time is the most valuable asset you'll have, yeah, you need to take this seriously and monetize it to some extent.

I think owning that communication channel with your customers alleviates you from relying on certain platforms too much. Obviously you need those platforms to reach everyone and reach the masses, but if you've got ... Kevin Kelly, he's got a really good theory on this on 1000 True Fans. If you're interested in knowing why it's important to own the relationship, I'd recommend reading 

. I'm not going to cover it here. That could be its own episode.

 book, as well. He talks about exactly the same thing, that once you have fans and they know you and they get to kind of think a one-on-one relationship with you, it's amazing how many doors that unlocks for you. You might not be thinking about that right now. Maybe you're thinking I'm too small, maybe it's only my friends and family that watch it, but if you can start building your mindset and around that and start thinking of this as a business, that transition will be so smooth as you're growing bigger and bigger and bigger versus trying to just shove something down at a later stage.

QuHarrison Terry:	Right. I think a lot of people too, when you're just starting out and on this journey of trying to communicate with people, you might not see the benefit right away.

Liron Segev:	Yeah, absolutely. Like, I'm commenting back. That's pretty much as good as an email.

QuHarrison Terry:	Right, right. And you're like, "Well, I don't know. I put a lot of energy and time in this, and I didn't get anything out." I think it's a rolling 90-day period. You have to assess your efforts over a 90-day period. Consistently put up shots for 90-days. A shot could be shooting an email, sending a tweet, sending a text, making yourself available, and see what works, and then go back and reassess where your time is actually valuable spent.

Liron Segev:	I mean, certain things are just simply not going to work with your audience. You've got to be okay with that. Not everything's going to be a slam dunk. I have to use a Maverick term. Not everything's going to be a slam dunk right out of the gate. You're going to have to experiment and see what works for you and what works for your audience as well.

Liron Segev:	That's the journey. I do like the point, and this is actually a super point what you made about if your audience is from mobile, speak to them in a mobile first environment.

Liron Segev:	You mentioned some of the tools and we went through them very quickly, so it's worthwhile mentioning again. What kind of tools would you suggest on mobile phones?

QuHarrison Terry:	So on mobile phones, if I had an audience and my YouTube data told me 50% or 69% of my viewers were coming from that channel, I would definitely try iMessage business chat, right? That's something that's been underutilized, but really what Apple did is they opened up an API and they allow anyone with a business to send a message as an iMessage directly to phones. That's really cool. And then that would be an angle, SMS would be an angle.

I think another angle I would go is overly sharing my Snap code or my social tags. Not just in the description, but I would better incorporate them into the mobile experience. So like maybe I say, "If you're watching this in the first week, I've added it to my snap story and it will be in my featured highlights." Right?

I would get creative knowing that you're not going to get someone to go from their phone to their desktop computer and do a checkout process right away. In some cases you could, but what you could do is get them to go to something that they're going to do intrinsically in mobile. And the social media apps that are more personal and ephemeral really only take place on your mobile phone.

Liron Segev:	No, but that's great, incorporating that messaging into maybe your outro as you're ending up your video. So, "Hey guys, after this I'll be sharing some behind the scenes, maybe on my Instagram or maybe on my Snapchat, and here is a link. Go and make sure that talk to each other there. I'm usually available for quick chats there, too." Drive the audience actively. Don't expect them to find you.

QuHarrison Terry:	Potato Jet does a great job of that. At the end of his videos what he does is he's like, "Hey, what'd you think? Did you like this video? You like the color orange background? You like this lens?", and then he tells people to chat in the comments. But he's super active in the comments, right? So he does it right on the platform, and I think people can do that too, but if you want to take it off the platform and build up an audience elsewhere, it's not a problem to to try that out as well.

Liron Segev:	I mean, you don't have to follow one thing. Try it, evaluate, did it work? Yes or no? If it did, do you have to tweak it? Yes or no? And then rinse and repeat until you found a formula that absolutely works. As you keep on saying, "we have to measure, measure, measure." Any tips on what we should be looking out for?

QuHarrison Terry:	Let's say I had a YouTube channel and I had a dashboard, what I would do is I would go into my YouTube dashboard, I would look at the different types of viewers that I have and where they're coming from. More specifically, are they desktop, are they web-based, mobile, are they video game consoles? Because that that could be interesting. I'm sure there's some channels if you're a streamer, you probably have a large percentage of people that are viewing you from a gaming device or a console.

Liron Segev:	Ooh, I like that. It makes sense.

QuHarrison Terry:	Yeah, and in that case that's a different experience because that's a shared screen experience, right? You have their phone which is free, they're watching on a TV, and then in some cases people have different monitors going because they're playing video games, right? So you can capture two other screens in addition to the screen that you have. And so that would be the first step, is I'd figure out where is my audience when they're watching my content?

Liron Segev:	Don't be scared of your analytics. Go and investigate that. Going to your demographics, go into your sources. One thing that we always glance over, we assume everybody is coming from the US or they're all English speaking. You'll find that India is a very, very big player on YouTube. Could you leverage that as well? Could you create something around those contents as well? Don't be scared of your analytics.

 makes it easier than ever to make that happen. You know? So get in the dashboard, use vidIQ and figure out where people are viewing your content. What I would do is I would make a super, super easy path for my highest engaged viewers to find me. In my case, let's say it's a mobile phone. I would go to Landbot and I would make a chatbot experience that is like a landing page. I don't know if you've seen Landbot.

Liron Segev:	Well let's explain it for those who don't know.

QuHarrison Terry:	Yeah. So Landbot is a website that allows you to create chatbot simultaneously or instantaneously with relative ease. You don't need to know how to code, and it looks really, really slick, and it's super fascinating and captivating. I would use Landbot to basically wow the viewer, because your content already did that. They watched your content, they're engaged. You need to meet them exactly where they're at, right?

And so if they're already amazed, keep them there. So I would use that so I wouldn't have to worry about the UX to design, and I would create an experience that was just asking them a question. It could be a survey. Answer these questions or fill out this form or play this game or do whatever." And at the end, I've gotten your information and you've gotten something out of it.

I would then reach back out and I would analyze all the feedback and all the surveys and all the results that are coming in, and I would reach out via email, Slack, Discourse, text message. Whatever platform you chose, I would reach back to those people and say, "Hey, I saw your results. This was really cool. I was fascinated, blah blah." And if you're an introvert, because if you're an introvert you probably don't want to do that, I would automate it.

I would pre-write all my little scripts, and I would just copy and paste it, copy and paste it, copy and paste it. Even if you don't want a response, make it so that they just can say yes or no.

And then you don't have to continue the conversation, right? But I would look back and just analyze how many yeses, how many no's.

Liron Segev:	Well, what's great about that is that not only do you get the cumulative results, so many yeses, so many no's, but I love the idea of identifying kind of your top engaged fan and then having a one-on-one conversation. "Thank you very much. You gave me amazing feedback. I really appreciate you being here. I'll look forward to seeing you on the next episode, and I'll be looking out for you in the next forum." Something like that.

Liron Segev:	Yeah, you have a fan for life.

QuHarrison Terry:	You definitely have a fan for life, and they feel comfortable suggesting things they want to see, topics they want to watch or hear, and that's powerful.

Liron Segev:	That's ridiculously powerful. I think what just to be kind of really the cherry on the cake here is if you can ever reply back to someone with a video message as opposed to an email or a message, that's a game over.

QuHarrison Terry:	Game over. That's hard. That's hard to do. It is very hard to do.

Liron Segev:	If you use a tool like IFTTT ( If This Then That), you can actually design a whole bunch of pre-scripted thank you messages or pre-scripted welcome to my channel messages, and simply use that and automate your life away.

Building up your YouTube community is hard work, but totally worth it for any serious content creator. Find out why on this week's episode of TubeTalk.

How to Build an Engaged & Loyal YouTube Community: TubeTalk 190 with QuHarrison Terry

If you check with anyone that's been successful on YouTube, the two words you will hear constantly hear are trends and community. If you want to know how to use trends and community to grow your YouTube channel, well, this is the right episode for you.

At vidIQ, we use the power of the community and leverage trends to bring our audience the most up-to-date and useful content we can. Our guest, Dan Currier from 

 does this superbly well. He's going to teach us the exact steps that he uses to build amazing audiences for his clients. In this podcast you will learn:

How to jump on trends that specifically benefit your YouTube channel

Why creating content on the back of one viral video may not be the best strategy

To create trending content that benefits your community

How to Build a YouTube Community Around Trends: Full Transcript

Liron Segev:	Who is Dan in a tweet? How would you describe you?

Dan Currier:	In a tweet, I certainly have a lot of passions and a lot of different projects I'm working on on YouTube. I have a YouTube channel called Creator Fundamentals that is all about simplifying YouTube to help other creators grow on the platform.

Liron Segev:	Fantastic. How important it is to understand this thing called trends on YouTube? We keep hearing about a viral video, and hashtag challenges. What are those keywords which have been flying around for us as creators who have our channels, what should we be looking for? Should we be riding those trends? How do we detect them early? Where do we even begin?

Dan Currier:	I think one of the biggest things to understand when it comes to trends is not every successful attempt to jump on a trend has a net positive gain for your YouTube channel. What we see is a lot of our creators who try to jump on a trend, something popular that's going on, and oftentimes they'll hit on something but it's not really aligned with the niche that they're focusing on for their channel.

While it may sound and feel like a good thing in the beginning, you're getting a lot of new subscribers and views and your live statistics are off the charts and it's a really good feeling, long term it can have some really detrimental effects on your channel. It's definitely important when we think about trends that we are looking at trending topics in line with the topics that we're covering on our channels.

Liron Segev:	Okay. There's a couple of things to dive into there. Just because something is trending and something is doing well as a general rule might not necessarily mean that we should be jumping on that trend. Is that right?

Dan Currier:	Right. Ultimately, what happens is when a situation like that occurs, say for example you have a YouTube channel with 5,000 subscribers and you hit on a viral video that's not related to your typical content and you bring in 2,000 new subscribers in a week. Well, now you find yourself in a situation where you have those original 5,000 subscribers that are looking for one type of content, a new 2,000 who are looking for a different kind of content and it puts you in that odd position of are you going to be true to the original audience or are you going to continue to make videos related to the viral content in an effort to appease the new audience.

It puts you at odds, it splits your audience, and a lot of times it just causes problems with your entire strategy. The long term effect of that can really knock creators off their game in terms of the type of content they should be making.

Liron Segev:	Is this true across the board? In other words, regardless of your channel size or your niche, if you tack onto something that isn't within your core audience or your core values, could those hurt your channel even when you're a bigger channel?

Dan Currier:	Yes. Obviously, if the trend that you jump on, you know, as related to your entire audience. If you have 100,000 subscribers and something hits and you get a couple thousand from it, obviously it's not going to dilute your audience to that degree. It would probably be a little less of an impact on your overall growth. At the same time, you're still bringing in that audience that ultimately is probably not going to be served any value from your future content because they came in on a topic you don't typically cover.

Liron Segev:	Okay. That makes sense. There's a core audience. Yes, there may be a bit of dilution on the fringes, but if you get back to doing what you're doing, you'll probably will retain that momentum and that audience will forgive you a little bit because you've built up some sort of a trust, some sort of authority. If you make this a habit, I think that you're going to feel it very much in your analytics.

Dan Currier:	Yeah, and a lot of times especially on small or midsize channels, when you do, if you haven't experienced a trending or a viral type video and that takes off, you're almost compelled to want to follow it up with similar content. It could be two or three videos. If you're doing it right, you're following that up with related content to ride that trend and get the most out of it. If you're riding that trend away from the kind of content you actually want to make, it can hurt you.

Liron Segev:	Well, the one thing you seem to have done really well is understand this and apply it to your own channel. You've got this great video called, ‘How to Get 1,000 Subscribers and 4,000 Watch Hours’ with about 400 odd thousand views on that particular video. This was done about a year ago, I would say, which is a really good time. Within a year, over 400,000 views. Amazing stuff. Tell me about that video. How did you come up with this? What was your research like? Was this a trending thing that you were going after or was it a specific question? How did this happen?

Dan Currier:	All right, there's a couple of different things here. Part of it actually ties into the other topic that you talked about, which is community. I'll explain that in a minute. Basically, what happened prior, obviously, I do content for YouTube creators. It's all about educating them and keeping them up to date on news.

One of the things that was going on was a delay in a number of creators who had reached 10,000 views, which used to be the requirement for the YouTube partner program, but had not been monetized. YouTube was putting out very vague information and basically stringing these people along because it had been months since they reached it but they weren't approving anybody. This started to get me thinking that a change was in the works because of the lack of information and the time that had passed.

I think one of the important takeaways in terms of trending is to understand your niche, be aware of current events that are happening, and recognize when certain changes or news articles are going to receive an emotional response from the audience. Where we were at this point, I could feel the frustration building. A lot of people kept reaching out to me asking me why they hadn't been monetized. Then YouTube came out with the news that they changed it from 10,000 views to 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours.

Now, the way that this actually ties into the community aspect is I have a number of different things I do to get news alerts and stuff. I have certain things that I've set up on Twitter to try to tag certain people to get information as quickly as possible to be able to jump on these things.

In that particular case, it was actually a member of my community. Somebody who was subscribed to my channel who reached out to me and let me know that that news article had dropped. Along those lines, one of the things that I had committed to do prior to this whole thing, which is a good tip for anybody is set up your studio. Set up your space in such a way where you can make content without a lot of preparation.

Meaning, if you can get a dedicated space to set up to be able to pop in and do a video quick, if you have content that obviously is related to that. The value, the way that I was able to capitalize on this trend is essentially being the first person to market, so to speak, where I knew there was going to be an emotional response. I knew this was a very important news topic.

As soon as I heard the news, I literally turned on my camera and made a video. Now the one that has 400,000 views was actually the second video because I decided right away that I was going to make two videos. The first of which was meet everybody where they were and it was a frustration video. It started off in YouTube's effort to screw small YouTubers because I knew that's how people were going to feel. In that first video I kind of met them right at the front door with that emotion.

That's another important concept or key with trending content is when a topic evokes emotion, you know there's going to be a large audience involved in that. I decided to meet them where I knew they were on an emotional level. Then that first video, I walked them through that emotion and ended that video with the idea of, you're going to have to come up with a way to move forward if this is important to you.

The next day I released the ‘How to Get 1000 Subscribers and 4000 Watch Hours’ to tap into those people who were frustrated but wanted to continue. That second video came out with the pity party's over, time for us to get to work. Then I outlined the ways that they could do that. I also, just from a content perspective, that particular video also referred to several other videos on my channel where they could get different information on aspects of moving forward. All in all it worked out pretty well.

Liron Segev:	It was reading the audience, reading the sentiment before an announcement was made. By the time the announcement was made, you already prepped, you ran your research, you knew what's going to be the pain points, and then you knew how to fix those pain points and this is exactly what people would be searching for. These are some great points. You said you used social media?

Dan Currier:	Yeah, variety of other things. There are lists on Twitter where you can tag a bunch of things so you can pop in there and see kind of a news feed from those particular tags. Like you said, I get Google alerts and I try to touch base in other news resources to try to stay on top of that stuff.

Liron Segev:	If somebody has a chef channel, a cooking channel, or someone's a vlogger or someone does, I don't know, check how tos, do we all fit into that same boat? Should we also be keeping an ear or an eye out on what's happening? Will that help us?

Dan Currier:	I think it's going to vary a little bit obviously based on the niche and the type of content that you're making. I would say any niche or topic that you're focused on that has the potential to have breaking news or news that people would want to hear about right away has the potential to be trending in that particular category.

I know a channel that does auto related content and there was a new car that was coming out. They jumped on the news of that particular vehicle and put together a string of videos based on that vehicle that just exploded their channel and got them a ton of activity. It was also in line with the topic. In that case, it was a trending topic that brought in an audience completely related to their channel and they saw a big boom from it.

Liron Segev:	Wow. Love it, love it, love it. Again, going back to understanding that you're in a niche but your niche doesn't start and stop in YouTube. It's bleeds into absolutely everything else. If you can understand that, you can probably predict those trends because you're in it and you're feeling the frustration or you're feeling the joy or you're feeling the anticipation of something being released and just use that to your channel's advantage. That makes complete sense.

Dan Currier:	I mean, and at this point I think YouTube is pretty much a not so microcosm of life in general because of its size and its mass and the amount of content that is uploaded every hour. Anything that happens in the outside world is going to find its way to YouTube because a highly significant portion of the outside world tunes into YouTube.

Liron Segev:	Clearly, absolutely. I think my point, and your point is as well, is that once we look beyond just the borders of YouTube and beyond this whole, why am I not on the trending page? Well, trending pages are there because they are already trending. If you can understand something before it happens, well, that's where the gold is. That's where you win in a big way.

Dan Currier:	To a large degree, the trending page itself is like the Rolls-Royce of success. Well, it's okay if you go out and find yourself a couple of BMWs, it's still going to do well for the growth of your channel. You don't necessarily ever have to find the trending page to be highly successful in terms of getting content to trend within your own niche.

Liron Segev:	Okay, brilliant tips, great advice. Keeping your ear to the ground is always, always helpful. Now, the one thing we did touch upon very, very quickly is this whole community. I know from my personal experience before I let you run with this is things change dramatically when I started understanding that it's not me versus every other person in my niche, but rather than me can be included as part of coworkers, so to speak, of people in my niche. Then that mindset change alone absolutely changed my channel, changed in my attitude, changed basically everything. What do you feel about the community as a whole?

Dan Currier:	I mean, to me, it all starts in the community. In fact, for me, this particular channel Creator Fundamentals actually literally started in the community. I was actually working on my other channel called The Average Dan that was kind of a how to channel where I would make videos to help people solve problems that I ran into and I couldn't find content on.

When I "got serious," and wanted to learn how everything worked, the first thing I did was join YouTube communities on Facebook. I got involved in groups, started interacting with other people who were trying to achieve the same type of goals that I was. Through that experience, I started to learn not only the value of going in and giving value and talking to people, but that there were a lot of people in the community that needed a source of information on what actually works and what doesn't.

I mean, everybody says it, community, community, community but it is, it is an absolute game changer when you realize how powerful it can be. For me, it started in Facebook groups. From that point on it extended to making the jump and actually attending conferences in person, which just takes the community aspect to a whole different level.

Liron Segev:	Do you find that social media and the comfort of home and the computer is actually not a bad place to start?

Dan Currier:	I think it's a great place to start because I think like you said, when you do start to meet people in person, you realize that the creator space is filled with people who are introverts and have social anxiety and all those things. It's surprising to some degree because YouTube provides, YouTube and social media in general provide an outlet for these people, myself included, where you can express yourself. You can get good at your craft. You can deliver information in a comfortable setting.

Again, going into the communities, the groups and stuff like that, you can interact with other people on your own pace without the awkwardness of meeting strangers in a loud room and that kind of thing. For sure, I mean, I think it's probably more. I would probably say there's more people who are introverted than not in my experience in the people that I've come across.

Liron Segev:	I've done my thing, I'm on Facebook, I've joined some groups, I've met some people virtually. What's the next step? Should it be a meetup, local meet up? Should it be a big conference? What would you advise?

Dan Currier:	For me personally, it was a big conference only because in the area that I live in, in Upstate New York, I don't have a ton of opportunities to have creator meetups. If you live in a city or an area that seems to have a YouTuber every three people like Utah, then definitely take advantage of meetups. Dip your toe in that experience and meet people in person and start to develop relationships above and beyond just helping to learn the craft.

The relationships that you make through the YouTube community can open so many doors for you. It's not just a matter of learning how YouTube works or those kind of things. There's really a lot of opportunities present themselves through the relationships that you form.

Definitely try to hit up meetups locally if you can. If you have never gone to a conference, I definitely recommend trying to take that leap in and actually attend one because it puts you in a whole different world. As creators online, not many of us can turn off the computer and go in the other room and chat about YouTube with our spouses or our significant others, our kids, our friends because they don't understand. Then you go to an event and everybody around you is talking about the same thing and it really flips a switch of what's possible when we start to do this thing online.

Liron Segev:	I agree 100%. I mean, my first time I attended VidCon, which is the YouTubers' Disneyland as I can describe it. The first time I attended it, I looked around me and then I realized, hold on. I actually put up this tweet from VidCon, which was retweeted by VidCon which was quite funny. It was more colored hair and Gorilla tripods per square mile than anywhere in the world right now because everywhere you looked around it was just people with green, yellow, purple hair, which I have the green so I'm cool with that. They're talking to their cameras. Everyone's just relaxed because you're not weird just talking to yourself in the middle of the shopping mall vlogging. Everybody else is doing exactly the same. How cool is that? Have you been to VidCon?

Dan Currier:	I have not been to VidCon. I have been to VidSummit and also Social Media Marketing World. Those are two very different conferences from each other.

Liron Segev:	Next up on your radar has to be a VidCon just so you can complete the traffic.

Dan Currier:	I know, right? It's funny though because I truly believe in the community aspect and one of the challenges for me living in Upstate New York is that all of the conferences are actually out on the West coast or a lot of the major ones. I'm actually trying to take the concept of community to the next step here in the Northeast and trying to create a creator event here that people can come to and experience that community without having to trek across the country.

Liron Segev:	Let me ask you this. What has got you really excited right now about YouTube?

Dan Currier:	For me, YouTube has really been the springboard of what's possible and what I can do in the creative space. When I first went out to that VidSummit, it was just one of the things that people get into. Especially when people are starting YouTube channels though, you'll ask them the question, do you want it to be a business? Would you like to make this your full-time career?

A lot of people because they don't have the confidence or even realize what's possible, it's just a hobby, you know? Then they make that, they get that first AdSense and they go, oh well, maybe something could happen here. Then when you really start to get the ball rolling, you're like, hey, I can turn this into a career. For me, like I said, it's a springboard. It's just the tip of the iceberg for me and what I want to do. Obviously, I want to be able to present the content on YouTube to all of the people that are coming into the platform and learning exactly how everything works.

Did you know that a one-off viral video can actually harm your YouTube channel if it doesn't fit in with your usual content? Find out the right way to jump on trending topics in this week's TubeTalk.

Posts tagged with "Community"