YouTube today has announced that it is expanding its community which was under testing for over a year with few content creators with polls, pictures, text, GIFs, and more. It has expanded the Community to creators with over 10,000 subscribers.
With the new community expansion, creators can involve their fans with polls, gather input for what videos they should make, tease about the upcoming videos in GIFs format which brings anticipation for a new video or upcoming big production. Creators can do crossovers where they can promote other channels and creators helping them drive traffic.
To help videos reach the audience across YouTube, the company will now let the most engaged viewers see Community posts in the Home feed, whether they’re subscribed to your channel or not. It also optimized notifications so that fans are eligible to receive them, but they won’t necessarily get notifications for every new Community post.
One biggest addition to the YouTube community is the Reels feature which is YouTube’s version of Instagram like Stories feature that is designed specifically for YouTube creators. It lets you create multiple stories and have them not expire. Focused features like linking YouTube videos and YouTube-y stickers. Reels, for now, will be a beta version before expanding to more creators.