YouTube is always touted as being about the community. While this notion has been tested as of late with the demonization and improper pulling of content, the firm stands by its motto by introducing new features that allow its creators to engage better with its audience.
YouTube is now unveiling a new tool called Community that will be open to creators with more than 10,000 subscribers. The new feature has been in testing for the past year and is made to bolster engagement with fans and an audience.
Some of the Community features are listed down below:
- Involve your community: Fans love to participate in the creative process! Grav3yardgirl has been using Community to connect with her eight million strong swamp family, and gather input for what videos they"d like to see. She let her fans choose what to unbox next and heard them loud and clear that they wanted her to bring back the much-loved “Wreck It Wednesdays".
- Bring fans backstage: Creators have been using Community posts to build anticipation for a new video or upcoming big production. Lele Pons shares GIFs that act as a trailer for her next video, while Kevin Durant posts photos on NBA gameday.
- Increase your reach: We’ve seen creators successfully cross-promote other channels and creators they love through Community, such as Anwar, Hannah, Lele helping drive traffic to Rudy’s first music video launch.
- Improved discoverability: As with videos, we want to show the right Community post to the right user, so we’ve made updates to how these posts reach your audience across YouTube. Your most engaged viewers can now see Community posts in the Home feed, whether they’re subscribed to your channel or not. We’ve also optimized our notifications so that your fans are eligible to receive them, but they won’t necessarily get a new notification for every new Community post.
- New formats: We want to do even more to give you easy ways to express yourself and engage with fans, so today we’re also unveiling a new feature. Reels are YouTube’s spin on the popular “stories” format, but designed specifically for YouTube creators. We learned that you want the flexibility to create multiple Reels and have them not expire, so we’ll give you those options. We’re also bringing creator-focused features like linking to YouTube videos and YouTube-y stickers. Just like we did with Community, we’ll be experimenting with a beta version of Reels to learn and improve the product before expanding to more creators.
Reels is probably one of the most important parts of this entire announcement. The new addition will allow creators to upload clips in a "stories" format, which has gotten quite popular with apps like Snapchat and Instagram. The feature is currently in testing but could give users a new way to shove out more personal and informal content to its audience.
Source: YouTube via TechCrunch, The Verge