Some of the biggest, most popular social influencers in the world are YouTubers, and with the platform boasting more than a billion hours of content viewed every day, there are countless ways to use YouTube to reach more people, and build an engaged community.
For brands and marketers, YouTube presents a huge opportunity, with unmatched video reach, and increased SEO power (YouTube is owned by Google). But at the same time, it can also be a very challenging social network to manage, particularly as your channel grows.
In this post, we’re going to look at some of the common challenges of managing your YouTube presence, and how you can overcome them through the use of three specialized tools.
What makes YouTube different in terms of management?
Around a year and a half ago, I spoke with popular entrepreneur and YouTuber Evan Carmichael to get his views on YouTube marketing.
One of the things Evan noted was that he often finds it a real challenge to maintain and moderate his YouTube channel – with over 1.3 million subscribers, there are sometimes too many comments for him to respond to, too many details to keep updated, and all in all, too much time spent trying to manage his account, which takes him away from creating new content.
That’s a problem when you need to engage with your audience on a regular basis, and respond to their questions in a timely manner – because that’s how you grow your audience, by actively engaging.
But despite YouTube’s popularity, both among consumers and marketers, there aren’t as many tools to help you manage your account as there are for other social networks. The need to respond to comments remains the same – while YouTube is video content focused, the ability to actively engage is what will separate you from the pack, and help maximize your efforts. Yet in order to do that effectively, you need to be able to stay on top of your YouTube activity.
So what can you do? Here are some of the best tools to help you manage your YouTube channel more effectively, and get better results from your YouTube marketing:
vidIQ
vidIQ is a YouTube-certified channel management tool that can help you every step of the way – from managing your comments to checking your channel analytics.
It’s a great companion tool for serious YouTubers. Apart from comment moderation, another very useful feature is that you can collaborate with multiple team members, which can come in particularly handy if you have a busy account, as you can’t really have one person managing it around the clock.
Each member can be assigned a role and have their own, specific permissions, so that you can build a workflow and avoid any confusion over who needs to do what.
Another big plus is that it also has search engine optimization features, like suggestions of popular tags based on search trends as well as keyword suggestions for all kinds of content categories:
And last but not least, you can access your channel analytics to better understand sentiment, track your brand mentions and engagement, and get insights into your audience.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is one of the few social media management tools that supports YouTube management – but, it’s also worth mentioning that it works with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google+.
Agorapulse offers several useful features that can make a huge difference in managing your channel – for example, when it comes to comment moderation, you can check all of your comments in your Social Inbox and respond to users. Plus, as you can also connect Agorapulse to a CRM tool, so you can check if you’ve interacted with that user before.
You can also handle pre-moderation before pushing any comments – so if you get any trolls or offensive comments, for example, you have a chance to remove them before they can do any damage.
To respond more quickly to comments, you also have the option to save common replies. This way, when you get a comment you can easily search for the right response and post it with a couple of clicks.
Like vidIQ, you can also collaborate with other users, plus, you can monitor your brand name to catch any mentions across YouTube, so you can respond or take action as necessary.
TubeBuddy
TubeBuddy is a browser extension/YouTube management tool that has too many little tools and features to count or get into here, but I’ll do my best to present the main features that would interest a YouTube manager.
Basically, it has a bunch of different tools in five main categories:
- Productivity
- Bulk processing
- Video SEO
- Promotion
- Data and research.
In terms of improving your productivity, TubeBuddy enables you to schedule your videos ahead of time, create ‘canned responses’ for comment moderation, use end screen templates to quickly add calls to action to your videos, and filter through comments so you can focus on what you want first (for example, comments that you haven’t replied to yet, comments that have a question, or comments that contain positive or negative sentiment).
Conclusion
As the second largest search engine in the world, YouTube presents a lot of opportunities for marketers – from driving more traffic to generating more conversions and sales.
But while it’s great to see your channel grow, the more it does, the harder it becomes to properly manage it. And while regular people and social influencers can get away without constantly monitoring their mentions and interacting with viewers, for marketers it’s extremely important to be active on this front.
Plus, as a marketer, you always have to be ready for damage control, especially on a platform like YouTube (or any social network, for that matter). Whether it’s a customer service issue, a complaint, or even just your regular hateful YouTube comment, you need to catch these as soon as possible and respond.
These three tools will help you do just that.