So What? YouTube Handles and what marketers should know

Well, hey everyone, happy Thursday. Welcome to So What the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I am Katie, joined by Chris and John. We didn't even rehearse that. We're just that good.

Uh this week we are talking about YouTube handles and what marketers should know. Uh what the heck they are, what you need to know, and what the heck you do with them. Um so John, this was actually something that you wanted to talk about. So what kinds of questions before we get into what they are? What kinds of questions do you have as a marketer about YouTube handles?

Yeah, well, you know, the first question is what are they? Do you need to be worried about it? And then how does it gonna impact not only YouTube but other social channels? So those were the the first, you know, things that came out of the gate as far as you know, how do you handle this and what can I change? And it's really interesting when you consider most people may or may not call YouTube a social channel.

I mean, there's so much activity over there, but they don't really think about it the same as Facebook or Twitter. And you know, should and should that be the way they approach this. Well, I think that we have someone with us today who can answer all of those questions and more. Chris, where would you like to start today? Let's start with what is going on.

So YouTube announced handles. Uh these are at signs. So these are at handles. So if you're familiar with you know, at mentioning someone on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, you know what a YouTube handle is, right? It's it's exactly that being able to at mention somebody really straightforward, really easy.

Um the purpose is uh for for chat for content creators to be able to tag each other a lot more easily to have something more memorable for people uh who are interacting, like John said, YouTube, in addition to being the world's second largest search engine, is also one of the world's largest social networks. And you know, the quality of discourse in the comments on YouTube may not always be the highbrow publication that you're looking for, but it is a social network. Um and so handles are beginning to roll out now. They are they appear to be going out essentially in order of channel importance, right? Uh as the the biggest channels have already gotten theirs and then they're rolling out slowly.

Uh appears to be based on the number of subscribers you have. When you uh the the first place to start is to go to youtube.com slash handle, right? If you have a YouTube channel and it will say, Hey, either you have or you have not gotten yours, they're basing it off of your custom URL, right? So if you have a custom URL already set up in your YouTube channel, they're almost certainly going to just reuse that for your your uh channel handle. So if we go to um my YouTube channel, uh we can see here it all it just picked at Cspen.

And this is what the page that exact same page looks like when you've got a handle. It says your existing stuff will continue to work, so you don't have to redirect anything. But now if somebody at mentions you on YouTube and you've got a handle sign, you get a notification. And so from what we can tell, this is this is two things. One, it's to increase engagement and make collaboration easier in general on YouTube.

And two, because it applies to all YouTube formats, especially shorts, they are essentially trying to uh replicate some of the functionality of TikTok. With more accessible data, I would imagine. With more accessible data with a big user base already, you know, YouTube has billions of users. Um, and they are really pushing the short video format. Uh we talked we covered YouTube Shorts uh what a couple of months ago now, uh on on our on on this live stream.

But that's that's essentially what's going on. It's pretty straightforward what these handles are. Here's the thing to pay attention to. Pay attention to your inbox. And when you get that notification, go and make sure that your your handle is all set.

Again, if you've got a custom URL already set up in your channel, which you'll see here, the YouTube custom URL, um, then when you get notified about the handle, it's relatively easy to set it. There have been reports of um bigger name creators who just kind of slept on the notification, and then somebody else with a much smaller channel nabbed the the handle that they would have gotten otherwise. So don't if you get the notification, don't sleep on it. So it also sounds like if you don't have your custom URL set up, now's a good time to do it because that's where YouTube is going to look first. Exactly right.

So you want to go um into if we go into YouTube here, let's go to customize channel. Uh and we're gonna go into customization, uh, go to branding. Uh I'm sorry, go to basic info and your YouTube, your custom URL. This is where you want to set it. Um so very you know, ours is already set, so we don't have to worry about that.

And then obviously, as you saw, once the handle becomes available, it'll disappear right here. Excellent. All right. So we've talked about what it is. So it sounds like it's very similar to having a username, essentially, uh, like you do on other social media channels that people can tag.

Um so what do marketers do with this information? So on Twitter, I see like these big streams of like follow Friday where you tag like 20 people up until the point you've run out of room. Is that something that people should be thinking about? I mean, I think it's a terrible idea, but I'm an N of one. Is that the kind of way that people would start using it in like every day?

Like, where do you put the tag in the comments and the description and the title? Like, how does walk pretty this is not my area of expertise, so help me understand what the heck I do with this now. Right. So what you would be doing with this is put you you can use the handles in a couple places. You can use them in the title or the description of a new video.

So I could put in, for example, uh video with CS pen, which is my handle. Uh, and I need to uh I think I need to be connected um with uh uh with the account to be able to uh tag properly. You can see it it didn't quite get it there. Um and then I can use uh the handle within the description as well. I believe I haven't checked this yet, but I believe you can use it within the comments uh on a on the uh channel as well.

But what happens is then that this gets uh this would notify my personal YouTube channel, like hey, trust insights tagged you into this into this thing. So I get a notification, just like you do on on Instagram. If you know someone at handles you in a in a thing, you get a notification. Okay, I have a question about one of the things that you said. Um so as you were saying video with at CS Pen, and you said I need to be connected with this channel, you know.

So that to me says that you can't just tag anybody who has a handle, no? Like what does that mean that you have to be connected with it? I well the reason like when I just tried to use my handle there, it didn't seem to be able to recog define and recognize my channel. So I'm not sure if if trust inside the trust insights handle is following my personal channel. So it pulled up a bunch of other accounts that I didn't recognize.

Um so I I can say I believe it is, but um that aside, that's interesting. So you can only tag people you follow. I'm not sure because we like I said, we just tried it and it did not work as intended. So that's interesting because that I can see, you know, is gonna inflate, you know, follower numbers, for example. If you're looking to tag a whole bunch of people but you don't follow them, you suddenly have to follow them in order to tag them, you know.

But then do you unfollow them as soon as they're tagged? It probably depends on the context of what you're doing. Right. It also could be my browser too, because I've got like a gazillion ad blockers, which always screw up how sites function. So it's entirely possible it's me.

Okay. I'm gonna go with that. It's entirely possible it's you. Well, I could totally see that we're gonna hit that thing of as soon as it's live for most people, there's gonna be these folks posting videos and tagging 500 people in the comments, and then suddenly there'll be some spam switches and you know, not be able to tag me if I don't follow you and some of those off and on things. But yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that stuff blows up at launch time.

Yeah, I it's interesting that because YouTube has to be a video, like that's its format. That's the thing, whether it's a long form video, a short video. I'm really curious about you know, so on Twitter, for example, someone can just ask a question and then tag a bunch of people to see if they can get an answer. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how that translates, or maybe it doesn't into a platform like this. It depends.

So if your channel is big enough, you can also create just posts, which essentially are like tweets, right? Uh, you have to have over a thousand subscribers to be able to do posts, and then um you can create images, image polls, text polls, obviously add in videos and things like that, and that goes to your subscribers. So uh the bigger channels tend to do posts um announcing stuff like hey, our new collaboration with Casey Neistat's coming out in you know what three days. Make sure that you've uh hit the notification bells that you you get a notice when it comes out, that kind of thing. So um, it's not just videos.

Okay. That's given that our channel is still growing, that's probably why I wasn't aware of some of these features. Um, and if you haven't subscribed to Trust Insights uh YouTube channel, you can do so at TrustInsights.ai/slash YouTube, which will also bring you straight straight to our channel and you can follow us there. Never miss an episode. Isn't that what people say?

Uh-huh. Um so do handles, the do they if you scroll up to analytics, do they show up there now as a metric? Nope, not yet. Not yet. Um, and it's not clear if they ever will or not.

Because when we look at the data, the if you use you know the social listening tool of your choice um for YouTube, the handles appear to just be regular text strings that YouTube auto-recognizes, but it it it's it's not substantially different. Like it's not it's not something new. I don't know if it's going to show up in the analytics or not. We will find out. Okay.

So I guess I'm still struggling to understand, you know, what marketers can do with having the ability, aside from claiming your own handle, which is always a good idea for your you know corporate and personal brand. Um, I'm still just struggling to understand the use cases of being able to tag a bunch of other handles. It's to notify them. Um, and it's not been stated publicly anywhere, but it would not surprise me if there if the way the underlying recommendation engine works, um, if you do publish a video that it might have a slightly higher percentage chance of showing up in you know to the the audience of the people that you've tagged. Um, you know, so if like if we put it uh a video out on the trust insights channel and we use the at handle for my channel soon we can get it working, um, then people who subscribe to me might see uh might have a greater chance of seeing that video in their recommended feeds.

I see. So um so similar to what we do with our network graphs, and for those who aren't aware, we do, you know, for big events on Twitter, we have network graphs that pull all of the handles that are being of people who are being talked about during those shows. Um, so that way you can sort of see like what the conversations are about, those kinds of things. Okay, so I can sort of see it in that context of why that might be helpful because it's in some ways just trying to get a uh longer reach into a wider audience by including somebody who is related in context. Exactly.

I could so for example, if I wanted to, I could take you know this video from Marketing Profs, once they've got their handles set up. If I posted this video that I shot of Ann and Market Russell and I use their ad handles, you know, it's likely to let them know that this thing exists. Um, which again, there is no notification mechanism right now. So if somebody posts a video of Taylor Swift on there and you don't tag that person in, their account is not notified that you've put this thing up, but if you use this handle, now it lets that that other creator know, hey, you know, this this video potentially of you exists. Now, can they take any action with it?

Can they repost it, reshare it like you can with other social platforms? It depends on um on what your account is capable of. Like so, for this, I don't know you. So if I want yeah, I want if you know Anne put up a video of me, um, I could put it into into a post on my channel. Got it.

But it's not the same sort of like one click uh experience that you have on other channels where it's just like you click the retweet button or you click the share button and it automatically reshares. No, it's not it's it's not it's not that way for the smaller channels now. There is definitely a packing order on YouTube in terms of what you're allowed to do based on your channel size. All right, John, you and I better be comfortable at the bottom of the totem pole. Yeah, well, it's interesting too that these are totally unique.

I mean, it just seems like there will be a lot of battles amongst subscribers that have similar channels because this you know if you don't get your name, you're totally out of luck. The other one too is you'd mentioned brand, like it's so important for that. Um, if you've got your handle the same across all channels, then if you're using a posting tool, you don't have to worry about cross stuff because you know we've seen that where it's like if you've got an Instagram and Facebook ad, but you don't have it on Twitter, and now you're having to change every post to meet the uh you know the standard so that the thing is actually live and clicks and works. Um so yeah, getting it is critical, but it does seem like that they're rolling out at their own pace, like you're just gonna get your shot when you get it. And if there's somebody there's a bigger fish upstream, you're out of luck.

Exactly. And I'm I'm sure that um behind the scenes, I'm sure there are some protections for those folks who are you know uh recognized brands with established copyrights, like you know, you can say okay uh that's our trademark, you can't use it. So you could not grab, you know, at Apple, I'm sure, you know, uh, or or Disney. Uh Disney would be the worst because their lawyers they'll they'll just show up at your house and just punch you in the face. Um but you know, for smaller brands, it is consideration.

Make sure that um you know how to do you know copyright claims and stuff on YouTube. Make sure you're familiar with those processes. So what else can marketers do with this information? Is there are there other utilities? Are there other use cases like, or is this just something more of a like a wait and see?

Some of it is wait and see. Some of it we already know uh what to do with this stuff because what's really nice about at handles is that it's a defined format, it's a known format that we're all used to dealing with, right? On Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok. We know how to deal with uh these at mentions, and that also means that we can use existing marketing technologies to process them. So, for example, if you use uh social listening tools, um, you know, there's there's so many of them.

Uh, I'm unfortunately over quota uh on on uh on my uh talk walker account for this one, so I have to use grand 24. Um, I set up a uh a uh video tracker for you know videos uh about Taylor Swift, and this is a tiny fraction because of YouTube's data API. This is probably about one percent of of the total volume. Um I it was actually funny. I had to file a tech support request with um Google earlier today.

I said I I need to increase uh my queries per per day limit because you get 10,000. Um I burned through that very, very quickly when I was trying to set up a Taylor Swift listening tool this morning. And I said, I need I need at least 180,000 queries a day. We'll see if Google comes back and says this is a silly use case. However, in social listening tools of your choice, you will you can set it up to monitor for a topic and then export that data, right?

You can export the data and start processing it. So real simple, you can see uh in this spreadsheet here. Let's make this just a little bit bigger. In the descriptions, you're starting to see the use of some of these handles, right? There's the the TaylorSwift handle, which means that if you're familiar with things like network graphs, you can start to build network graphs of who is influential about a topic because we're looking for which handles are mentioned more frequently than others.

And we're again we're we're starting to see that data become available. It's still not, I'd say we probably need a another month to wait because that's how long Google said it's going to take to roll these things out. But then you're going to start to be able to build influence graphs effectively for YouTube. Up until now, it's been a real struggle for any of these uh influencer identification tools to look at more than you know who's got the largest number of subscribers in YouTube. Now, with the the handles, we can start to see, okay, well, which channels are being recommended by other creators the most.

And for those wondering, this was the network graph that I was mentioning that we create on Twitter uh for the events. And so this is obviously using YouTube data, but when we create those other network graphs, we're using Twitter data to see who's being the most talked about. Exactly. And to John's point, if brands are doing a good job of uh essentially capturing their handle and stuff like that and making it synchronous across different networks, then if you create a network graph for say Instagram or TikTok or Twitter and you post it on YouTube as a motion picture as a video as opposed to a static image, you could probably use that same handle list and say, okay, you know, here's the the 10 or 15 or 20 most influential people. And people could see the actual animation, you know, rather than just a static image.

So it could actually be a lot of fun for the more advanced uh influence identification tools to show um motion of influence over time. Hmm. That'll be interesting to see too if they have import function, you know, if you'd be able to dump your Twitter list and just upload it into YouTube, that would be interesting. Yeah, I don't know about that, but certainly you could do it um a very simple check and say, okay, here's the Twitter handle, you know, just because the format is exactly the same. So if I go, if we go back here to uh browser window, if I go to YouTube.com slash at Tyler Swift, right?

I can see that there's a working profile there. And so I could very quickly check to see. Oh, that got loud. Um is that handle that has a Twitter handle? Is it does at least have a working YouTube channel on the other end of it?

Hmm. That's interesting. So what else should marketers be thinking about in terms of the potential of this data? More than anything. One of the things that would be handy to know, particularly if you have a named competitor that you are competing with in the market space on YouTube, you could look at who your competitors are collaborating with, right?

What kinds of influencer collaborations again with these handles being uh available, it's there's obviously likely to be an advantage for tagging in people in collaborations. Now you could get a uh a better understanding of which uh influencers and creators your competitors are are working with. Um and that might be a short list of uh folks, you know. If you are in, say, the IT space, you're probably collaborating with network chuck, or you will be at some point, um, because he's just one of those creators that has a huge tech audience of folks that you know are are all into into IT and gear. Um, so that's one aspect.

And the second aspect really is from a big picture perspective, this is all about encouraging more social connection and more collaboration. Um, so as we create content, one of the things we want to be doing is we want to be collaborating with others, and this tool makes it easier to mention and and loop in other people's audiences. You know, um when we post, for example, our our our podcasts and stuff now on uh on YouTube in this live stream, uh, we'll probably want to start tagging in my YouTube handle because again, I've got an audience on my personal handle, but we want to bring that audience into the Trust Insights audience. And vice versa. Mm-hmm.

Interesting. So I know you might not know the answer to this, but how long do you feel smaller creators have to wait in order to get their YouTube handle? We know that it will um YouTube will automatically start processing everything November 14th. Right. That's when they say if you have not already been notified, we're just gonna assign one to you.

So it's gonna be on or before November 14th. So, you know, obviously we should be checking our our inbox uh fairly frequently to make sure it has not a magically appeared. Gotcha. And so if you get one that you're not happy with, you can try to change it if it's available. Exactly, if it's available.

Um, and then you can't change it again for 14 days. So, like if it came up with some random string, we could say okay, trust insights, and then we'd be locked into that. We couldn't change again for 14 days again to prevent people from from essentially handle squatting. Gotcha. Well, John, you better start reserving like super fun, cool guy.

Make sure that that's available for you. This is my shot here. If I can get John Wall back from the NBA player, he's mostly retired now. So this I'm finally repeating. You might, yeah.

I think this is the time to do it. Yeah, and it's on a channel basis. So the marketing over coffee channel is obviously one who wanted to you know get at marketing over coffee. Yeah, we haven't got the invite yet on that. So unfortunately, that's not not top tier.

The other thing that um I think it's probably worth uh smaller channels considering is if you don't have the viewership to get to at least to a thousand to um to get to some of the more advanced features, it might be worth dropping a couple hundred bucks to run YouTube ads promoting your channel just to try and get that subscriber count up to up above the the minimum for some of the more advanced features. That makes sense. Yeah, especially if you're really angling to keep a very specific handle for your brand consistency. That makes sense. Spend a little bit of money now and play the long game of making sure that you can keep your brand uh intact.

And be able to do stuff like posts, you know, image posts and and run polls to your subscribers, things like that. Obviously, you know, you you want a loyal audience, but at least to unlock some of the basic features, yeah. It wouldn't it wouldn't be a bad idea to spend a little a few bucks. What do you think, John? What other questions do you have about it?

And you know, the one thing that's running around in my head is so now would you be able to start kiting these names? Like if you took all the largest Twitter accounts and saw which ones don't have YouTube accounts, is that giving you uh, you know, is there something to be mined there? But that seems like a spammy thing to get involved with. It's a spammy thing to get involved in, and YouTube specifically called out in their handles announcements. You may not sell or transfer handles.

Uh it is against the terms of service, they'll boot you off the platform. Interesting. Now that won't stop, you know, uh some you know nefarious actors from doing that, but uh the chances of them sucks being able to successfully extort someone else are pretty low. YouTube is really really good about copyright claims. Um, and they are very, you know, they they they and their robots are very vigorous about enforcing copyright.

So the chances of being extorted um successfully are relatively low. Interesting. Well, I feel like it's a nice new shiny object. At the very at the very least, the takeaway is you know, try to boost your follower number, subscriber number so that you can secure the handle that best aligns with your brand. And otherwise, it sounds like maybe start, you know, experimenting with uh, you know, tagging your friendlies in things to see if that boosts your numbers at all.

Um, and then just kind of set up your monitoring tools, see what comes out of it, and just kind of wait and see. I mean, I feel like people don't do a lot with handles right now in general, other than massively tag a whole bunch of them to try to get seen elsewhere, which is never been a great strategy. So I'm I'm just curious to see what marketers feel like they can now do with this additional piece of data. I mean, I think the like you said, setting up some social listening uh on your key topics on your big topics is is easy and it's a smart move because as handles become more available, you want that data. You want that data to be able to analyze it now.

For example, we've had a monitor in um in brand 24 here running for Google Analytics for over two years now. And we've we've collected hundreds of thousands of data points. And then as time goes on, right? If I go into our our inventions here, um, I can look at just video just in the last 30 days. There's you know, 814 videos about this thing.

I can start to export that and you know, see if there are emerging influencers with those handles uh in use right within these topics. So it never hurts to have some socialisting setup for your key topics, the things that you want to know more about, and then look at the landscape. What do you think, John? You're gonna set up your own YouTube channel just to get your handle. You just need to make more videos.

That's the key. You know, it's great to have your handle, but if you don't have stuff you want to promote, you that's card before the horse. So uh get out and start shooting. Mm-hmm. Yep.

Start shooting, start doing live streams, you know, uh platforms like StreamYard and stuff, make it super easy. Um if you are already on uh platform like TikTok, just download your TikTok things, uh real videos and upload them to YouTube as shorts. I it's it's so simple. If you can do that, you know, and then do the exact same thing with Instagram reels. They there is speculation because no one has confirmed it, that videos you upload from other platforms are are recommended less frequently than videos you make natively on those platforms.

But if you've already made the video once, just upload it to those other places. You're not gonna cause any any harm that way. Right. No, that makes sense. It's you know, that aligns with our transmedia framework that we talk about in terms of you know scalability and using your resources in an efficient way, create the thing once and then post it across multiple platforms.

And then, John, to your point, if there's consistency with the handles, then you don't have to keep trying to figure out what handle is it that I'm trying to tag in this. You can create the thing once and then just sort of schedule it. Exactly. And there's and all the lot of the tools allow you to do this stuff. You know, Adobe Premiere.

I was doing this the other day. Um, you can create a sequence in Adobe Premiere that is exactly sized for YouTube shorts and stuff. So if there's a if you want to make custom content for short form video and you don't want to just take you know existing video and crop it. The tools let you do this really easily. And when it comes to the use of handles and uh on YouTube, it's pretty clear they intend that to be used heavily within shorts, right?

They intend for you to be doing a lot of tagging. So take advantage of the video tools that are out there. Start making a list of the people that you want to mention that you want, you know, maybe want to have some affinity for. Start mentioning them in your videos uh and things like that, and and just crank out these these minute-long videos. It's not it's not rocket surgery.

All right. Well, I don't have any other questions. I'm sort of I'm just taking it all in. This is you know, I felt like when you said YouTube panels, I'm like, I don't know what that is. And now it's like, oh, I know what that is, but I still don't, I haven't quite figured out like what you do with it.

So I still need some time to think it through like where it fits in to everything that we do. Yep. Again, start with collaboration, start with um tagging people in when we do any content that with anybody else. You know, for example, when we post this episode of So What, we should probably see if brand 24 has an ad handle on YouTube. And if they do, I want to mention them in the description, say, hey, we featured you in this video.

We talk about you know the marketing AI Institute frequently. We talk about Talk Walker frequently, and as folks get their handles, super easy way to just let them know, hey, you're in this video. Mm-hmm. That makes sense. John, final thoughts.

Yeah, dude, start tagging everybody. Start tagging everybody. Yeah. Think about this, John. Every time you have a guest on marketing over coffee, you know, go through and just make sure they're tagged in.

Go back. Once you get your handles for marketing over coffee, go back into the historical archives, right? You know, of the old videos and stuff. You know, KD and I, we can do that for the Trust Insights Podcast. If we know that there are brands we mentioned, uh, you know, Agora Pulse and stuff, uh, as soon as they get their handle, we want to go back and on even our old catalog and tag them in.

So that would that's that's the next step. That's the easy next step is leverage the existing library you have and and start start tagging away. Mm-hmm. All right. Well, if there's nothing else, folks.

Let's uh head on out and we'll catch you next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI Podcast. At our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter.

Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.