As a YouTube strategist, I’m always hunting for new ways to help creators grow, and I’ve uncovered a strategy that’s seriously underrated.

One of my clients recently saw a 521% increase in impressions, bringing in over 733k new eyeballs, an 800% boost in likes, and 160 new subscribers, all without uploading a single video.

How?

The YouTube Community Tab.

At first glance, it might not seem like much, but when used effectively, this tool can work wonders for growing your channel.

Let me break it down for you:

‍

‍

The Secret Power of the Community Tab

‍

Now I know, it sounds a bit underwhelming, but before you go clicking off this article, stick with me as this little tab is about to become your new best friend once you know how to use it correctly with what I call the CCBS Method.

​

‍

If you’ve never used it, the Community Tab is a space where you can post polls, photos, and text updates.

Most creators overlook it, but with the right strategy, it can become a growth machine for your channel.

​

‍

Priming Your Audience

‍

So I call this the 'Week of Hype' strategy, because the creators I work with have seen significant increases in views by priming their audience ahead of time.

​

Here’s how it works:

1️⃣ Start the conversation early. A week before releasing a video, post a question like: “What’s your best productivity hack?” This gets people thinking about your topic.

​

2️⃣ Use a poll. For example, “Which is harder: staying productive or getting started?” Simple but engaging.

​

3️⃣ Drop a behind-the-scenes photo. Photos outperform links almost every time because YouTube prioritizes them in the feed.

​

4️⃣ Pose a spicy debate. For instance, “Notion vs Evernote: Which is better for productivity?”

​

Having the comment section flowing with hundreds of comments is a really good engagement signal to YouTube and gets our audience, essentially fighting in the comments about which tool is better.

When we release the video, their interest will be at its peak. It will be an instant click when they see the creator, an authority, has uploaded a video answering that debate.

‍

‍

Case Study: GrowVeg Channel

‍

So, let me show you how my client GrowVeg implemented this:

A few months back, I had noticed that in the past they would get great impressions and reactions to their community posts, but they weren't consistent.

For example, one post celebrating hitting 500 videos got over 3k likes and 166 comments.

Their 600k subscriber celebration got 2.8k likes and 170 comments. Almost all their top posts were about hitting a milestone.

It's a huge thing, but it's mainly about the creator, not about providing value to the viewer.

Obviously, I'm not saying don't celebrate the wins, I'm just saying that if we had this level of success with a milestone post, what could we do with really valuable community posts!?

​

So, we started posting more in June after a long break and the results have been pretty good:

We've had over 733k impressions, a 521% increase than the previous 90 days. 8.6k likes, 800% up from the last 90 days. This also increased our subscribers by 160.

​

Most people don't realize that, when you post to the community tab, YouTube pushes it to your subscribers and to new viewers likely to be interested in your post.

​

This means you can use the community tab to build your audience and get more subscribers without even uploading a video - which is pretty cool!

‍

Anyway, we used a mixture of images, behind the scenes photos, polls and more, all of which were responded to very well.

For example, this photo of Ben and another creator, Charles, got over 1,000 likes with many viewers commented with excitement for the upcoming video.

If we never posted this, that engagement would not exist.

‍

So, using the community tab to bond with your audience is a good thing. It can help turn them into a community.

‍

This post got 57k impressions in one day, and 147k in the month after.

‍

If you think about that for a second... it means 150k eyeballs (or technically 300k eyeballs, lol) saw a post highlighting this video!

That's thousands of people who now have the GrowVeg channel on their mind and becoming aware of a video that they many not have known about otherwise.

‍

‍

The Community Content Bucket System

‍

Now, like anything staying consistent is sometimes a bit difficult so we're now starting to look at how we can upload three posts per week with the goal of daily community posts.

You might be thinking, 'That sounds great, but it also sounds like a lot of work.' And you're not wrong, but, it’s actually a lot easier than you may think.

​

That's why I've developed a system to make this process much smoother.

I call it the 'CCBS method' which stands for the Community Content Bucket System.

‍

Essentially, we're creating different categories of posts that we can cycle through each week and the best part is, a lot of this written content can actually be posted on X, LinkedIn or even your newsletter so you’re being ultra productive here and killing two birds with one stone.

​

We have different types of content buckets:

1. Video Teaser: Hype the upcoming video.
2. Engaging Poll: Get the audience involved and thinking.
3. Behind-the-Scenes: Photo from the shoot day.
4. Throwback Thursday: Resurface older but relevant video
5. Quick Tip: Post mini-lesson from the YouTube script.

​

My advice: Start simple. If you can only do one post for an upcoming video, that’s fine.

‍

‍

Don’t overthink or overwhelm yourself, just start small and overtime build up.

It’s up to you how you want to arrange these, but pick whatever is easiest for you.

I’ve found that through creating constraints for each day with a specific post, it actually becomes way easier to think of posts compared to sitting there worrying about how you’re going to have to write 5 posts this week.

‍

‍

ChatGPT Prompt For Easy Content

‍

Now if you want, you can make this even easier for yourself by just copying your entire script, pasting it into ChatGPT and asking it to help generate all these posts for you. Here’s a simple prompt that’s helped me:

‍

'Create three different polls with an engaging question that will cause a debate on the topic [INSERT TOPIC HERE] with our audience of [INSERT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE HERE]. Then provide 4 answers to choose from.'

​

This will save you so much time and give you something to tweak to your language style.

Now, if you want all of the prompts to make this super easy for you, you can get them for free here.

‍

‍

Watch The Video Version of this Article

‍

​The Best Kept Secret to More Views on YouTube - This is the video version of the email you just read.

I go a little more in-depth into this strategy if you're interested in learning more about how to use the community tab.

‍

‍