YouTube Communities: Will Your Audience Move In?
YouTube has officially rolled out Communities, a significant new feature designed to give creators and their subscribers a dedicated space for conversation and connection directly on their channels. Think of it as YouTube’s answer to a social feed, aiming to foster deeper engagement right where your video content lives.
For years, creators have relied heavily on external platforms like Discord, X (Twitter), and Reddit to build and manage their communities. This move by YouTube is a clear attempt to bring that crucial engagement back onto its own turf.
But what exactly are Communities, and how might they change the way you interact with your audience? Let’s dive in.
What Are YouTube Communities?
At its core, Communities is a new, dedicated space on your YouTube channel where subscribers can create posts, reply, and react. It functions much like a Twitter Community timeline, providing a more dynamic and interactive feed than the traditional “Posts” tab.
Here’s a key distinction:
- Posts you make as a creator will appear in both your Community tab and your existing Posts tab.
- However, posts made by your subscribers will only appear in your Community tab. This means the Community tab is truly where the two-way conversation will live.
Getting Your Community Started: The Creator’s Side
YouTube is making Communities available to all creators who have access to the Posts feature and choose to opt-in. The rollout is happening over the next few weeks.
Here’s what you need to know about enabling and managing your Community:
- Enabling is Mobile: To enable your Community, head to the YouTube main app on your mobile device, go to the “You” tab, then “View Channel,” tap “Edit,” and switch on “Your Community.”
- Welcome Post is Key: YouTube recommends creating a “welcome post” to set the tone and invite subscribers to start posting. This is a smart move – setting expectations early helps shape the culture.
- Mobile-Only Access (For Now): It’s important to note that Communities are currently only available on Android or iOS mobile devices for both creators and viewers.
- Moderation Power: You have a robust set of moderation tools at your fingertips, available both in the YouTube app and on YouTube Studio Desktop. These include:
- ‘Hold All’: Allows you to review every viewer post before it goes live.
- Adding Moderators: You can invite trusted moderators to help manage posts, hide users, and engage on your behalf.
- Minimum Subscription Time: You can set a requirement for fans to have been subscribed to your channel for at least 1 day or 7 days before they’re allowed to create their own posts. This helps incentivize subscriptions and may also reduce abuse or spam by adding a small barrier to entry for newer accounts.
What This Means for Your Channel and Beyond
This feature opens up new avenues for deeper audience connection:
- Beyond Videos: It allows for continuous engagement outside of your regular video upload schedule, fostering a more “always-on” connection.
- Fan-to-Fan Interaction: A huge benefit is enabling direct conversations among your subscribers, helping to build a stronger sense of belonging within your community.
- Content Insights: You can use your Community to poll your audience, ask questions, share behind-the-scenes moments, and gather valuable feedback that can inform your content strategy.
While I’m personally a bit skeptical about how much the gaming niche, which is so deeply ingrained in using Discord for everything from private streaming to casual chat, will embrace this, I can definitely see other YouTube niches benefiting greatly from having a native community space.
YouTube does have a history of rewarding creators who adopt new features early with additional exposure, so it could definitely be worth getting involved now and testing it out for your channel.
For now, if you’ve been invited, dive in and see how your audience responds!
Pete’s Content Corner
Delve into my weekly selection of content creation highlights—handpicked videos, podcasts, and tweets that promise to captivate, educate, and entertain.
- Twitch Affiliates and Partners can now run their own 35% discounts on 5+ Gift Subs! This is a cool step towards giving creators more control over their monetization, though remember you’re limited to seven promotions for a total of seventy hours per calendar year. Use those wisely!
- YouTube Shorts is still an absolute juggernaut. CEO Neal Mohan just announced they’re now averaging a mind-boggling 200 billion views per day. If you’re not factoring Shorts into your content strategy yet, this number is a pretty loud wake-up call.
- AI avatars in China just raked in over $7 million in a 7 hour shopping livestream. The avatars were trained on five years’ worth of videos to mimic their jokes and style. It’s a stark reminder of the slightly terrifying direction AI is taking the creator economy.
Another week, another wave of platform updates. It’s always a lot to keep up with, and frankly, I’m always a little cautious when a platform introduces something new that falls outside its core functionality. We’ve seen features come and go before, with only a handful of creators truly leveraging them before they quietly fade away. Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on these changes to see what sticks.
Thanks, as always, for taking the time to read Stream Report.
Pete
