The YouTube Community
Interacting with your audience and learning as much as you can about their interests will go along way towards your success on YouTube. After all, your success depends on them engaging you and viewing your content.
The best way to do that is to head into the community section available through the Creators Studio dashboard. This where the most productive set of tools are to interact with your audience.
• Comments – The first section is the Comments section. This is where you can see and respond to comments your audience published on your channel. Comments that have been deemed by YouTube to be offensive or spam are help for your review here too.
Engaging your audience includes replying to comments, likes or dislikes, or giving the comment a heart (❤) symbol which is even better than a like! Regularly responding to questions and engaging your audience will more your content more memorable and build a sense of community to your followers – turning them into loyal brand ambassadors.
Using this section of the dashboard will make it much easier than navigating to each individual videos and respond to comments there – especially when you have a lot of videos published.
• Messages – The Messages section is where your personal messages are stored. Personal Messages are message sent directly to you. Normally when somebody comments on one of your videos, those comments are public and anybody can see or engage those comments. Private messages are “private” and only seen by you.
• Subscribers – The subscribers section will allow you to view all of your channel subscribers (only users that allow their subscriptions to be made public). It’s important that you review this information routinely. The data will contain information if any of your subscribers have their own channels or maybe you can use the information to see their activity on other YouTube channels. This is the type of data that will help you develop content ideas.
• Community – The Community Settings section is where you configure all of the commenting and messaging settings…
◦ Moderators – Add moderators to your channel (allowing other YouTube users to manage your comments).
◦ Hidden Users – The list of users that have been blocked on your channel due comments flagged by YouTube as inappropriate or spam.
◦ Block Words – Upload words that you want to prevent from appearing in your comments. Any comments posted that contain any of these words will automatically be help for review.
◦ URL’s – You can allow/disallow URL’s from being published in your comments. If disallowed – all comments posted with URL’s (or #Hashtags) will be held for review. Live chat messages with URLs will also be blocked.
If you engage this setting, you, your moderators, and your approved users can still post links.
The Community Section holds a lot of flexibility when customizing commenting on your YouTube channel:
- Comments on your new videos: Allow all comments, hold potentially inappropriate comments for review, hold all comments for review, or disable comments.
- Comments on your channel: Allow all comments, hold potentially inappropriate comments for review, hold all comments for review, or disable comments.
- Creator credits on your channel: Allow all creator credits, hold all creator credits for review.
- Messages in your live chat: Hold potentially inappropriate chat messages for review.
It doesn’t matter if you are using your account for marketing or monetization – disabling commenting can be a red flag to many YouTube users. They will question your authenticity and intention. Most users are aware of that there are many YouTube accounts that post misleading content, plagiarize, or scam viewers and those accounts typically have commenting and ratings disabled.
You Should Do More Than Reply to Comments…
Regularly responding to your viewer comments will spread a lot of goodwill, but you should also be proactive and add new comments of your own (if they add value to your viewers).
Publishing your own comments on your videos is a good way to build your following – you can include links to your other videos that your viewers can follow which will result in more total views (and advertising revenue).
You can also publish comments on other channels – just be respectful to that channels owner. Only drop links and talk about your content if it is extremely relevant to that channels viewers and compliments what that channel’s video is about. Do NOT engage in spam on other channels or try and poach their traffic. Those actions will tarnish your reputation quickly.