Trendy Tree YouTube Tip #2 Connecting with Subscribers

Tip #2 Interact with your subscribers to build your base. Respond promptly to subscriber comments. One of the hardest things for me is to respond to negative comments. Your first impression is to tell them what you think! But, you can't do that. Don't start a negative conversation. Just accept what they say as constructive criticism as best you can. Any comment that is vulgar or hateful, just don't approve it and don't respond, let it go. I haven't seen a comment so bad that I felt that I needed to notify YouTube, but I'm sure you can do that if necessary. One thing that we try to do consistently is thank folks for subscribing. Here's how to do that:

1. Sign in to YouTube and click on your user name.
2. Hover over the little gear wheel to see YouTube Settings.
3. Click on the little wheel
4. On the left side bar you will see Account Settings
5. Go down to Notifications
6. Be sure to have a check mark or dot on "Send me emails about my YouTube activity"
7. Every time someone subscribes, you will get a notification email from YouTube.
8. In that email, it will contain a link to the person's YouTube account.
9. Click on the person's name.
10. Once you are on their page, click on "about"
11. On the right side bar you will see a link "send message"
12. Click on this box and type your message and press send.
13. Not every person will have the "send message" link; some people choose not to receive YouTube messages and you just have to skip these. But you must click on "about" to see the message link.

On the average, Trendy Tree receives 50+ subscribers per day. This is a lot of emails! I usually type my message thanking them for subscribing and inviting them to visit our website and include that link: http://www.trendytree.com Sometimes I mention that we're having a sale, or even include a coupon just for subscribers, etc. I will copy this message and paste for the rest of the emails. You can also see your subscriber list by going to your Creator Studio > Community > Subscribers. The list of names will show there and there is a link to send them a message. I have continued to use the email method since the emails that have come in, have not matched the list as far as I can tell. Don't know if there is a lag time to when the names show up on the list, but I've not been able to match it up. We can't afford to get behind on responding to subscribers because if you do, it can take a hours to catch up. To keep organized and know who you have sent a message to, in the search box on my email I enter "subscribed" This will bring up all the YouTube emails in the order they came in. I put a red flag on the first subscribed email at the top of the list and start sending out my message. I continue to do this until I've worked down through the list to the last red flag I had put up, which is usually the day before. Then I remove this flag and I'm all set for the next 24 hours. You can also view your "Fans" under the Community Tab, but you won't see this until you have at least 1,000 fans. These are your recurring viewers and folks who comment the most. As far as I know, there isn't a way to get an email list of your subscribers from YouTube. It would be nice, so you could include them in your email marketing, but right now you can only message on a one at a time basis which is impossible with 26,000 subscribers. So, you can see how important it is to reach out to them when they subscribe. If they don't comment a lot, it may be the only opportunity to have to make a good impression. Should you subscribe to everyone's channel that subscribed to you? No, not in my opinion. Only subscribe to channels that you are actually interested in. Many times when I'm looking at the subscriber's page just before I click on "about" I may see something that interests me. It could be their channel, or many times it's a video that they have favorited or another channel they recently subscribed to. Sometimes you look at someone's channel and it looks like they are gamers. Makes you wonder what they found interesting about your channel! But, I've also had comments made on some of these channels by Moms who used their teenager's YouTube account to view our videos and they are the ones who subscribed)) So don't discount any of the subscriptions you might get)) If you automatically subscribe to each channel that subscribes to you, it could be considered spam by YouTube and this is not a good thing, so be careful. There are limitations as to the number of channels you can be subscribed to, based on the number of subscribers you have yourself. Remember that everyone that visits your channel, can also see who you are subscribed to, unless they have their settings private. Responding to Comments

1. Sign in to YouTube and go to your Creator Studio
2. Click on Community
3. Click on Comments
4. This tab will show comments "published comments" "held for review" and "likely spam"
5. In your YouTube settings you can choose if you want to "allow comments" "hold comments for review" or "disable comments"
6. Click on "held for review" and approve or trash comments
7. Click on "published comments" and respond to the comments.
8. Check the "likely spam" too because sometimes legit comments will be there and you would want to approve them.
9. You can also get to the Comments section by clicking on "view all comments" that is in the body of your notification email from YouTube that you have a new comment. We have found that we can be more consistent with responses if we just routinely check our Comments in the Creator Studio

Responding to Messages

1. Sign in to YouTube and go to your Creator Studio.
2. Click on Community > Messages
3. Tabs there are "Approved Messages" "Filtered Messages" "Likely Spam" and "Sent Messages"
4. Respond appropriately.

For at least a month one time, I didn't notice the Message tab and once I clicked on it, I discovered that someone had messaged us to let us know that some of our videos were being pirated by a user. We were able to notify YouTube and our videos were removed from that channel. Stay tuned - more tips coming up!