That's right; you heard it here first, YouTube is making strides to be the next big thing in the social media game! For a long time now, 16 years to be exact, it has mainly been solely for videos. Everything from music to tv shows, unboxing videos, and those oh-so-great family channels (can you sense our dislike for them?!) can all be viewed on the platform today. Now YouTube is making changes to bring its platform into the realm of a more traditional social media site that is just one for videos.
YouTube Community Tab
This feature has been around for a while, but many people miss it. The community tab allows creators to send out posts, gifs, and other non-video content to their subscribers or visitors and engage with them more directly. So how do you access it? To gain access to it, your channel will need over 1,000 subscribers, and once you achieve that many, you'll have access to the community tab within a week to start engaging with your subscribers and visitors. Why would you want to use this instead of posting to other platforms? Well, it's pretty simple. It keeps all of your subscribers in one place, and more likely, they'll navigate to your videos and watch them (hello monetization!). Of course, what kind of marketers would we be if we didn't also recommend having your other social platforms linked to your YouTube so they can view and interact with your other social content?
Shorts: YouTube's TikTok
Shorts are named as they are bite-sized clips, much like TikTok's, that give your subscribers and visitors fun, digestible content to absorb from your channel. In the ever-competitive race to grab someone's attention on the internet, a longer traditional YouTube video might not hook them quickly enough to have them watch it all the way through or even watch more of your content. Although that may say more about your content than people's attention span, we digress. YouTube shorts allow people to see what you are all about without committing to watching one of your longer videos. Make them fun and unique to show off your personality and give someone a reason to head over to your channel and dive down into your longer videos. Oh, and don't forget the call to action telling them to do that!
New avenues for making money on YouTube
Social media has become a new job in this day and age (man, that makes us sound old). Everything from being an influencer to people watching your game or cooking allows you to earn money online. YouTube is no different; they have been giving creators a way to make money via ads for quite some time. They are now giving creators new ways to monetize their content. With the decline in Twitch happening in more significant numbers every day, people are flocking to YouTube in search of new places to watch live content and support their favorite creators. YouTube now has the ability to send super chats and super stickers during live streams. Coming soon is the option to have a channel membership via a monthly subscription of your favorite creators. Lastly, remember those fun shorts we mentioned before; those are going to be getting a monetization plan soon! So creators, keep your eyes peeled for incredible new ways to make money on YouTube!
YouTube Handles
Just announced in October 2022, YouTube will roll out handles for users on YouTube. Just another step in the direction of becoming a more traditional social media platform. The introduction of handles is excellent, as now you can brand your channel to match your other social handles and have a unified presence online. It will also help users find your channel more easily on searches and tag you in comments and posts across the platform. We're pretty excited about this change and can't wait to begin using YouTube as another outlet to help you market your business.
Are you ready for YouTube to be the next big social platform? As marketers, we are! We've been telling our clients for years to get on YouTube and start building a presence so that when the day came, they would already have a big following to fall right into the new algorithms that YouTube is putting in place to support all of their new features. If you're not already on YouTube, do yourself a favor and hop on now, make a video or two and get rolling. The more you make now content-wise, the faster you'll grow. Just remember, like any other social platform, find your niche and make as much content in that space as possible to keep your audience entertained and informed. Before you know it, you'll not only have a successful channel on YouTube but could be making some decent money too!