YouTube Expands Community Features Allowing Businesses Greater Customer Engagement

YouTube recently announced that its “Community” feature will be available to creators with more than 10,000 subscribers.

YouTube Community

About a year ago, YouTube launched a “Community” feature that allowed the invited creators to connect with their audience in-between uploads with GIFs, text, pictures, polls and more. Following its success, the video content platform is now expanding access to more creators.

“We’ve been working closely with creators to build, test and refine this product,” said YouTube’s Senior Product Manager Roy Livne in an official post. “Now, we want to take this opportunity to share some of our learnings and updates.”

YouTube Reels

Besides Community, YouTube has also joined the growing trend by adding a Snapchat-like post format called “Reels”.

“Reels are YouTube’s spin on the popular stories format, but designed specifically for YouTube creators” said Roy. “We learned that you want the flexibility to create multiple Reels and have them not expire, so we’ll give you those options.”

Viewer Engagement is the Goal

In the meantime, the good news for small business owners is your most “engaged viewers” will now be able to see your Community posts in their home feeds, regardless of whether they are subscribed to your channel or not. And just so that your community doesn’t feel spammed, YouTube has also intelligently optimized notifications in a way that your fans will get to see your updates, but they won’t necessarily receive every new community post that you publish.

As mentioned, YouTube Community is now only available to users with a fairly serious number of YouTube subscribers –at least 10,000 – and we hope that they will expand it to users with lower number of subscribers.

Image: YouTube Creators Blog

This article, "YouTube Expands Community Features Allowing Businesses Greater Customer Engagement" was first published on Small Business Trends