Marketers are missing out on using the YouTube Community Tab. This is a social-media feed-type tool which can show your text posts, polls, and even carousel photos. Importantly, these can show even to people who are not subscribers, so it’s a great way to engage and build that audience that you’re building on YouTube.
HOSTS: The Video Marketing Podcast is hosted by:
– Dane Golden – VidAction.tv
– Shelly Saves The Day – Shelly.video
TRANSCRIPT
Dane Golden:
If it’s on YouTube, they’re like, well, it came from YouTube. And, and the funny thing about it being a Community Tab, it also gets shown to people who are not subscribers at all.
I really think that we’ve been missing out talking about this, because it’s really under the radar and there’s still a lot of people that don’t use it right. And that is the Community Post tab. What is that all about?
Shelly Saves The Day:
So the Community Post tab is a special section on your YouTube channel. And that is going to allow you access, once you unlock it, you’ll be able to post a photo, or even a carousel slide of photos. You can do polls. You can basically even write just a little update or quick blurb.
And so it’s a really great way to engage and build that audience that you’re building on YouTube.
Dane Golden:
Yeah, but, but we’re, we’re a video. It’s YouTube is video. Why do they have all these other little bells and whistles that are not video?
Shelly Saves The Day:
I think that people like to engage with video creators in lots of different ways, and this is just an interesting thing. Another way to give them more of you, so it could be anything from building community, like you could use it with two different thumbnails and you could say, “Hey, which one do you guys like better?” basically unlocking your own focus group for A/B thumbnail testing, and then your community feels involved because they got to be part of this survey. And so, I mean, something as simple as that, or I have two videos ready in the hopper. Which one do you want to see? All of a sudden, you know, they feel like I’m part of this community, I’m bought in, and you know, maybe you’re going to hear the feedback from them, oh, I’m dying to see this video first.
So you’re able to do that and then you feel like you have a stronger relationship and connection with that creator or.
Dane Golden:
So really they’re taking in some of these elements that are similar to the other social media and saying, Hey, we’ve got a feed too. We’ve got things where you can post images, where you can post polls or just some sort of text and link to something. We’ve got that too. And it’s sort of a feed based and I think these, these show up.
You see these a lot more on mobile than you do on desktop. In your feed, is that sort of, it, is that, is that why YouTube does it? People sort of expect it from a social app?
Shelly Saves The Day:
I don’t know if they expect it, but it does give you more options and availability to be in front of your audience because you can show up with Community Posts in a feed. And so that is just another opportunity, especially on some week where you don’t. Upload a video. What if you have something where you know you’re on vacation and you can almost use it like a blog post, update like a, a Twitter if you would, and be like, Hey everyone, I’m currently in the Maldives and you have this beautiful picture.
And you’d be like, what’s the thing I should go, you know, should I go see Phish or should I go, you know, eat this thing? Do you want to see more photos? And so you could even, instead of pushing them off to some separate, App to follow you, because some May and and some usually don’t. You could put some of that stuff there where your community is and be like, Hey, you want to see this kind of cool thing I’m working on?
Or, Hey, there’s an update right now. There’s not going to be a live stream today because I’m out of town. Or like quick updates like that. You could also use the community tab for that.
Dane Golden:
And, and the funny thing about it being a community Tab it implies that it helps build your community and, and it does, but it also gets shown to people who are not subscribers at all. So it is
Shelly Saves The Day:
Correct
Dane Golden:
one way of expanding your community because it’s showing to just other people.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Yeah, but if you also wanted to keep it as part of your tight-knit community for people who have channel memberships enabled, you can create a separate post that only the people in your membership can also view. So, That could be something interesting right there. Or you could have it where anyone can view it, but you could be alluding to some video that is members only.
So the other people, even though they can read the message and know that there’s a private member video, they can’t see it, which increases that chance of fomo. And if they are really interested, they may even get a membership to be able to watch that video.
Dane Golden:
Now. Now, if I’m a business that’s trying to grow my audience and trying to get people to, to come in, you know, I’ve got to think about the feature. So first of all, I’m going to think about what does it offer? There’s the polls, there’s the images, there’s also animated GIF. You can link to a video. Am I forgetting something?
Is that pretty much it? I think that’s it.
Shelly Saves The Day:
I mean, yeah, that’s a lot of.
Dane Golden:
So, so I’m thinking, well, what can I do? Well, the first thing I’m thinking is, Hey, I’ve got somebody on Instagram that’s posting images on a regular basis. I can take pretty much those same images and post them here. It’s a way of, it’s an engaging way of in, of showing, you know, what we’re all about.
It’s a similar type of thing. You could repurpose those images. I, I don’t think that’s a bad idea.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dane Golden:
What people say gets the lowest engagement rate is ironically when you link to a YouTube video on your channel. So you’re thinking, oh, great, this is going to get me more views. But what does it do? It, it doesn’t do that because there’s already plenty.
Videos in someone’s feet. This is sort of a pallet cleanser, I guess.
Shelly Saves The Day:
And there could be a strategy behind maybe your video came out and maybe it did really, really. And you could say like, have you seen this one? This is my best performing one. On the flip side, you could be like, wow, here’s a, a top list of five things that X. And you could say one of the things and like, did you catch the rest of ’em?
Did you catch this video that came out this week? And you could try and breathe life into a video that maybe didn’t even perform that well. And people forget that you could go back. A year in time, or you know, to any YouTube video, and it doesn’t even have to be your own video. It could be someone else’s.
If you want to advertise a collab that you did, if you were interviewed or you were on a podcast, and that is on YouTube. If you could do that and then you at and tag that other creator, they’ll also get a notification. And it also just increases visibility that way as well, which is really great. But if you think about it, it could revive, older videos in your catalog if you say something like, oh, you know, the latest update of X software is out.
But if you missed the last update and you need to know what happened, even though that was a year ago, you could bring up that video again. I mean, if the topic is still relevant and still have people. Talk about that one.
Dane Golden:
It might be also if you’re, a local business or, you know, if you’re offering something special or something timely, you could put a post to some sort of discount. What do you think of that?
Shelly Saves The Day:
Definitely you could do that and it could be a great indicator to see if traffic is coming from a specific source, because you could have one that is YouTube specific. And you could then know and track how many clicks are coming from this, you know, let’s say Community Post versus a code that was embedded in all of the rest of your YouTube videos.
So you could start looking at some of those metrics there. Or if it’s, you know, like I said, a seasonality. It’s like, oh, it’s Black Friday, or it’s the, you know, after Christmas sale and this is a limited time, so if you’ve been looking at our, you know, product, get it now with this discount code. And so that’s also a great way to hopefully boost some.
Dane Golden:
Yeah, and, and a lot of people actually don’t track. They, they might put a link to something through their website or, or some sort of page they don’t actually track, which piece of content it’s coming from. If it’s on YouTube, they’re like, well, it came from YouTube. I don’t know. We have done this for, for businesses before, is actually create unique Bitly links for each description, and then inside of that we put a u t M code.
So it’s really trackable to know. It doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the best video for you to have, but it is an indicator. For instance, someone might have watched a different video first and then. This video is the one where they actually finally linked. It’s hard to know, but it is one indicator to know, Hey, this video is actually getting clicks better than another video.
And you can do that with a Community Post or poll as well. It takes a bit of work and it takes a bit of management to do it, and it can get, it can get problematic. And, and that’s actually really unfortunate because. Google is tracking. They’re tracking that if you roll over any link in the YouTube description, they’re tracking exactly where it’s going, but they don’t want to tell you, even though they know, even though they have Google Analytics, they could put those both together.
They purposefully are not telling you. I’m not sure. But I wish they would build that into, because I think that would be very valuable. But the main part is that Google actually doesn’t want you to click off of YouTube at all. Right?
Shelly Saves The Day:
They would prefer not
Dane Golden:
Just like Instagram, doesn’t you, that’s why Instagram doesn’t make any clickable things in the description. You can only click from one place. Same with YouTube. They don’t want you to click either, but they give you more opportunity to do so, but they don’t encourage it. So what are some things a, a business could do other than what we’ve said?
I think one thing you can do and, and it’s hard to know when you are, when you’re getting people to watch your videos, sometimes you don’t know, even from the analytics. You don’t know a lot about the viewers. And that’s why we’re always encouraging comments. So comments really get businesses excited.
You can show them all the numbers. Hey, you had 500, a thousand views, but one person’s comment, they’re like, did you see? We got a comment? We got, Hey, did you forward that comment? Hey, what, you know, there’s humans out there and so one of the things I think polls can do and anything where some get you get someone to comment is you reinforce that this is something that’s happening with your customer base.
One of the biggest problems that businesses have is that they give up on YouTube a little early, too early. They’ve been nurturing this, but since there haven’t been a ton of comment, They’re, even though they’re getting all these views, they don’t realize that their customer is being nurtured because they haven’t identified them personally.
And I think with Community Posts, if you can encourage people to give an individual comment on whatever the thing is, what state are you in today? You know, that’s just one thing. Where are you? I’m in Alabama, I’m in Oklahoma. Do you have a. Whatever it is to get that conversation started. Can you think of some other things in this, in this area?
Like what
Shelly Saves The Day:
actually yesterday or last week, it was National Pet.
Dane Golden:
Yeah.
Shelly Saves The Day:
And, so you could have had a couple of photos of different pets and be like, you know, are you team Cat or Team Dog, or Name the, give us the name of your pet, or something like that. Or, it’s a national boot day, which I found out was a thing.
You’d be like, what’s your favorite brand of boots? Or something like that. Or, you know, Especially if you are in something that is going to be retail based in the end. So let’s say you’re a home decorator, you could have all kinds of polls and stuff coming. You could do a March Madness, entire type of bracketing system where you say like, what is your favorite type of room decor?
And every day people can vote between like, is it modern, is it classic, is it colonial, is it whatever else? And then you know, and then it goes to color palettes. And at the very. You design something in a video that is going to be in that color palette, in that design style with said type of furniture.
And then what do you know? That whole room is available for sale, but if you like something very similar and it didn’t get picked, you can work with us to find other pieces or you know, like there’s a ton of things you’d be like, which lamp do you like the best? Which wall color would make you feel the most peaceful when you come home?
What kind of bathroom fixtures, like, you know, the, the, the shiniest and prettiest that you like there? Endless possibilities when all of a sudden too, then it’s, available on Amazon to purchase and you have an affiliate link in there. In fact, if I were someone who was working with an influencer, I would say you could bundle in the price of a Community Post that stays up for a certain calendar amount of days with a link.
Maybe a tracking link going to a specific site or product to see if you could maybe even move things. I’ve had people that I know, they’ll also do things like not only, Hey, right now here are my Amazon favorites. At the end of the month, they recap and they say, here are the things that you guys are loving the most right now.
These are the top five items. In my Amazon shop that you guys have purchased, and all of a sudden now people love to go with the crowd and be like, these are the top five items I’ve been looking at that all of a sudden I’m going to go buy number three, or whatever it is. So there’s actually a ton of opportunity for affiliate money to be made here as well.
Dane Golden:
You know, What I don’t see people doing is I don’t see people linking to a poll from a YouTube description. So let’s say you’re, or from a comment for that matter, you could say, you know, we have an ongoing poll to find out who our most awesome viewers are. Tell us your name. Shout us out in the comments of this poll, and it’ll be an ongoing feed and you could link to it from every video.
Is that some way to, you know, just welcome new viewers, welcome new subscribers, and it can,
Shelly Saves The Day:
of welcoming people, and you could also use it as a funnel for people getting onto an email. List, you know, yeah, you could absolutely make a Community Post. Have you seen the newest newsletter that just came out with five different ways that small, you know, businesses can use social media to get their, you know, their phones ringing off the hook.
Make sure that you look for it in your inbox, or if you don’t have it, comment, you know, or like, or sign up for the email here and like all of a sudden you’re driving people to your email funnel, which is awesome. I mean, why not? Why wouldn’t you?
Dane Golden:
Mm-hmm. What other problems do we have? I think
Shelly Saves The Day:
Well, you know, sometimes there isn’t a problem except the world just needs more humor and I’ve seen that, in between postings, especially if you have videos that are maybe a little more serious in nature or take longer to make. You could have all kinds of funny, like behind the scenes stuff. You could have funny memes, jokes about the industry that you’re in, or common misnomers or things that may not necessarily ever make a full-blown YouTube video, but it sure would be funny and just would go over well with lots of people and they get a chuckle out of it.
And it could be something like Meme Monday where every Monday you post some sort of funny thing and, and you are creating this almost episodic, where appointment based, where they have to come back on Mondays, I’m going to see this cool new meme from, you know, this channel. And it’s going to be roughly based on the type of content that they make.
So they’re interested in it and that’s just growing your own, relevancy and recency for YouTube to say, oh, these people really, really enjoy coming back to this channel. We should show them more in the feed from this channel
Dane Golden:
What is the most you would do for Community Posts? How? What’s the most
Shelly Saves The Day:
a day. Maybe one a day.
Dane Golden:
Would you do it on the same day you posted a video? No problem.
Shelly Saves The Day:
I mean, you could, um,
Dane Golden:
Would you do it at a
Shelly Saves The Day:
might do it the day before. If it’s something like a call for questions, perhaps you have something where you’re doing a live stream on a topic and maybe you’re calling for questions for things to be done in there, or I’ve seen a lot where people post a few days before or maybe a week before the video’s going to come out and they’ll be like, I’m doing a hot Takes type of video and give me your opinions on X industry.
Blank product and they take those and they collect them and then they use those and sometimes feature them in the YouTube video, which would come out in the subsequent week. So I probably, you know, you could absolutely make Community Posts as soon as your video drops. You could do it a couple hours later, so Sure.
Dane Golden:
Yeah, so there’s a lot of ways to do it. A lot of ways to engage your community, build your community, expand your community, and you know, this is a ideal way to make a video based on some sort of feedback that is ongoing in that Community Post area. So I really think this is an area I’m going to spend a lot more time.
Focusing on, I’m going to commit to doing this Shelly. because I think that, I think I’ve got the lot to offer and I think people would appreciate, and I’m going to, I’ve never been a, a, a GIF maker. I think I might make some GIFs too.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Yes, we should. Oh, talk about that sometime. Not that it’s probably relevant to the, but you know, it’s just fun. I have I think 364 million views on my GIFs currently from my account.
Dane Golden:
How? On what account?
Shelly Saves The Day:
On my Giphy account. So I actually make GIFs and you may have unknowingly been using them on Instagram or other places that are integrated with Giphy.
Dane Golden:
Are they?
Shelly Saves The Day:
Don’t always brand them with my name.
Dane Golden:
Are they from the TV show “The Office?”
Shelly Saves The Day:
No, they are not. Mine are more of the stickers, you know, with the transparent background than like the, the usual video ones. I have a few that are like that, but I have, tons, I have about 370 different GIFs and everything from like, Taco Tuesday to, coffee drinks, to cowboy boots, to, YouTube subscribe buttons.
Like everything you could think of, like I said, and they don’t all have my name in them, so you could very well be using them and you just never know it.
Dane Golden:
Well, we’ll put a link to that in the description. How do you, how do you make your.
Shelly Saves The Day:
It could be anything from hand drawn and procreate and export it. It could be done an animated inside of Keynote. I’ve also done a few inside of Final Cut Pro, so I mean, I’ve.
Dane Golden:
Let me ask a different question for me. Who doesn’t want to do anything hard? And if I want to just take a clip of one of my videos and quick make a quick GIF on of it. What’s the easiest way?
Shelly Saves The Day:
You know, I think you can actually do it well, one inside of the app, Giphy. Also you can do it inside of the script. If you were to make, a short little three second video, even if you were to record it inside and do like a funny thing or even ad text, whatever, you could export that short little snippet, clip it of, video and export it as an animated gif.
I think that’s one of their options.
Dane Golden:
Now, I think that I th now I think that the. The YouTube platform says you can do GIFs up to 16 megabytes, but other people say you actually can’t do it more than three megabytes. So keep it short. Keep it short and sweet. Now, does two buddy also have a GIF making? I think they do, but I
Shelly Saves The Day:
Once upon a time they did, and actually YouTube asked them to take it out, so
Dane Golden:
Okay. So, but Giphy, you can take some sort of section from a YouTube video Very.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Not from a YouTube video. No.
Dane Golden:
From a video.
Shelly Saves The Day:
You could upload a short, clip, like three seconds and it will help you turn it into a gif. Yes.
Dane Golden:
Alright. Great. Well, until next week, Shelly, how can people find you?
Shelly Saves The Day:
You can check out my website, which is Shelly.video, which will give you all the information about me or hang out with me on YouTube under ShellySavesTheDay.
Dane Golden:
Shelly.video, is that a new url or are you just telling me
Shelly Saves The Day:
I have like 30 URLs and they all go to the same place. So I used to just say ShellySavesTheDay.Com, which is actually longer to say than just like Shelly.video or Shelly.fyi, or Shelly.biz. So now I’m just saying Shelly.video because it’s easy.
Dane Golden:
All right, well, I’ve got a cool URL if you want to talk to me. It’s TalkToDane.Today and that’s if you want to book a consulting call or you can see me at VidAction.tv or VidActionTV on YouTube. Until next week, here’s to helping you help your customers through video.