Page 214 - SKU-000506274_TEXT.indd

C h a p t e r 1 7 Leveraging the YouTube Community 193

Caution

When you’re participating in the YouTube community, you can’t be blatantly
promoting your business. It’s no good to leave a comment along the likes of
“Great video! Look for our new widget in stores near you.” That’s self-
serving and doesn’t do anybody any good. Instead, you need to contribute
relevant and useful comments; you have to advance the conversation, not
hijack it.

How does this work in reality? It takes time and effort. You want to search the
YouTube site for videos like yours, or users who have something in common with
your business. After you find a sympathetic user, view his videos and leave some
comments. You might want to mention that you have similar videos in your chan-
nel and encourage friends of this user to head over to your channel to see more. At
the very least, you want to spark interest in your videos from the person whose
videos you’re viewing. If you view his videos, he’ll view yours, and hopefully tell
other viewers about what he’s seen.

What goes around comes around; the more comments you leave, the more people
see your name and channel and the more views your videos receive. To get people
interested in your channel, you have to show interest in theirs.

Posting Bulletins to Your Channel’s Subscribers

One type of community available on YouTube revolves around your YouTube chan-
nel. Everyone who subscribes to your channel becomes a member of your own
community, and YouTube makes it relatively easy to communicate with (and pro-
mote to) those subscribers.

The best way to get a message to your subscribers is to post a bulletin to your chan-
nel. This is a short update that you enter on your channel page that then appears
not only in your channel but also on each of your subscribers’ home pages, in the
Recent Activity module. (Figure 17.1 shows a bulletin on a home page.)

Bulletins can be text only or include a link to a YouTube video. To post a bulletin,
click the down arrow next to your user name at the top of any YouTube page, then
select My Channel. When your channel page appears, click the Post Bulletin tab;
this opens the new pane shown in Figure 17.2.

You can now enter the text of your bulletin into the large Enter Message text box. If
you want to include a video in the bulletin, enter the link to the video into the Enter
Your YouTube Video URL box. A preview of your in-progress bulletin appears in
the box on the right side of the pane. When you’re ready to post the bulletin, click
the Post Bulletin button.