Building your community Building your community

Building your community

Learn the basics of how to grow your YouTube channel, create exciting content that inspires interaction and manage the conversation.

So many creative options!

There's more than one way to bring your videos to life. YouTube gives you the space to create, using everything from VR to live streaming, so that you can let your viewers into your world in new and exciting ways.

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YouTube Shorts are the fun, easy way to create content for YouTube's billions of users. All you need is a mobile phone, your ideas and a little help from our tools.

Read more about YouTube Shorts

YouTube Live lets you create and share on the fly. With all kinds of formats for streaming events, teaching classes, gaming and more, YouTube Live is made for giving viewers an in-the-moment glimpse into your life.

Read more about live streaming

Premieres help you turn your next video into an opening night event. We'll build you a landing page with a unique URL so that you can promote your Premiere and build hype before the big day, all while chatting with your fans.

Read more about premiering a video

Get Creator Tips for premieres

Community posts are a simple but effective way to stay in touch with your fans. Any creator with over 500 channel subscribers can post things like polls, photos and GIFs, special announcements and more.

Read more about Community posts

How to interact with your audience

Interacting with fans of your channel is a big part of what it means to be a creator. So go ahead – spark big ideas, dream up new ways to create, and keep the conversation going between uploads. We have tools that can help with community engagement and more.

The more you engage with your audience, the more they'll engage with you. Talking to viewers and responding to their feedback is key to growing your channel. Here are some tips to turn viewers into fans, and fans into a community.

Watch a video about audience engagement

Let your viewers know that you're paying attention to what they're saying by replying to comments. You can answer questions, respond to feedback, or just throw viewers a little love with a heart. You can even pin comments that you really like to the top, so that it's the first thing that viewers see.

Get Creator Tips to build community with comments

Read more about managing your comments

YouTube routinely removes comments that violate our Community Guidelines. However, you may still have comments or viewers that you'd like to delete or block. We have tools and filters that allow you to review or remove comments that you find offensive to you and your community.

Watch a video about our policies

Read more about moderating your comments

Finding new viewers and fans

YouTube has plenty of ways to help you attract new viewers. Learn some simple but strategic tips for helping people find your channel, from how you word your captions to who you collaborate with.

Partnering with other creators can benefit both of your channels. Learn the ingredients for a successful collab, including who to partner with and how to promote your video.

Get Creator Tips for collaborations

After posting your video, you'll want to optimise its metadata. Learn how to edit your descriptions, track your metadata history and compare versions to see what works best for your channel.

Learn more about metadata

YouTube's captions editor lets you add captions to your videos. This means reaching a wider audience, including viewers who are hard-of-hearing, deaf or speak another language. Bonus: On average, videos with captions have higher watch times.

Learn how to add captions