What happens when you build a really tight community around your YouTube channel because you’re responding to every single comment that you get across all your videos, but at some point like you’re getting too many comments to keep up with now, what do you do? That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

I have a question. You could be having a lot of comments coming each day, maybe 100 to 1,000 comments. How could you manage them all? This is something that I want to talk about because it’s something I’m currently struggling with here on the Video Creators channel because it used to be I could keep up with every single comment that I got across all my videos here. But now, as I keep adding more videos and my library keeps growing and other videos are still very active, it’s just impossible for me to keep up. And I feel bad because I want to respond to every single one.

What can I do?

Well the solution that I’ve come up with is to give myself the freedom not to respond to every single comment, but instead just set aside like a half hour or an hour or whatever my time permits for that day to say, OK, the next half hour I’m going to do nothing but respond to comments. And I will just start responding to as many as I can. And when a half hour hits, that’s when I stop responding.

I always start with my most recent comments because the people who comment there are more likely to be the active subscribers, the people who are really engaging in this community. Whereas the people who are commenting on videos from like months ago, probably just found it through search and I want to respond to them if I can, but I really want to foster the community of the people who are active here on a daily basis first.

Something I’ve seen a few other creators do that I think could work well also is they’ll put an annotation at the very front of their video saying, hey, I will respond to the first 500 comments on this video. And they do. So right when that video goes live, they’re usually sitting there for the first hour or two hours– I don’t even know how long it takes to respond to that many comments– and they’re just responding to all of them. Then once they’ve hit 500, they stop, and then move on with their day.

A bigger problem, though, might be knowing how to keep up with these comments. There are some tools out there like VidIQ that do a great job with organizing all your comments, helping you efficiently work through all of them, showing you who you probably need to respond to, and kind of filtering out people that you might not need to respond to as much.

But if you don’t have access to a tool like that, a great way to do it is to make sure you set your channel to get an email notification for each comment. And then so your inbox doesn’t gets flooded with messages from YouTube with every new comment, filter all those messages into a new label or new folder in your email. And just let them sit there and accumulate until you have time. And then you say, OK, for the next hour, I’m going to sit down and respond to all these comments and then just simply work your way through the emails until you’ve used up your hour.

And that system doesn’t work too bad because Gmail will automatically group together conversations all the same comments from the same video. So you can just open up one and boom, boom, boom, boom, like respond to all the comments on that video. And then go to email and kind of go through the rest and you can pick out which videos are more recent, respond to those emails first. So it works, not the best, but it works.

I would really love to hear from you guys for my own sake. In the comments below, share with me how you guys keep up with all the comments across your channel. If you are at that point where you’re getting them all day long, all day, share with us your system for how you continue to engage and interact. That’d be awesome and very helpful for me and for many other people who are watching this video. So thank you for sharing your experience and advice with us.

If you have a question you would like me to answer in an upcoming Thursday, there’s a link in the description text below this video where you can submit your video to me. And I would love to put your video here and feature you and kind of have more of a face to face conversation. Or you could also comment below or post it on our Video Creators Facebook page, tweet to me or whatever works best for you.

And if this is your first time here, I’ve love to have you subscribe. Every week I do some Q&A with you guys just to help you guys out because I really believe that a lot of you guys have messages that could really change the world if you just grew your audience and your message is spread. It could really make this world a better place. So that’s why I do what I do.

On Tuesdays we take a look at online video news and talk about the implications it has for us as creators. And then on Wednesdays I give you guys some YouTube tips and advice and ideas. And then on Thursdays we go YouTube Q&A just like this. So subscribe. And I will see you guys again next week.

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