YouTube’s New Feature Makes Getting #Discovered Easier Than Ever

Vlogger, blogger, content creator – however you identify, if you’re into making videos and hoping to shake-up your strategy, you’ll love this brand new update. YouTube announced the launch of Hashtag Showcase Pages, which is basically a fancy way of saying you can now search for videos by hashtags. What does this mean for users?

On the plus side, your content now more than ever has the chance to reach users it might not have otherwise. On the more daunting, this-might-mean-more-work-for-you side, it means the tags you choose for your videos mean more than they ever have.

When you search by a hashtag, every video on the platform that’s used that tag will populate, ranked by how well that video performed. You’ll see a bar at the top of your screen that lists how many videos are marked by the tag you’ve searched, as well as the number of distinct channels that have used the tag.

In their announcement explaining their decision to allow users to search this way, YouTube states:

“Previously if you searched for a hashtag or clicked on a hashtag on YouTube, you’d see a combination of content using the hashtag in the video as well as other related content. Starting today, anyone searching for a specific hashtag on YouTube, either the desktop or mobile app, will see a new dedicated page that only contains videos with the hashtag, which are sorted to keep the best videos at the top.”

So what does this mean for content creators in saturated content spaces on YouTube, like fitness, food, or makeup tutorials? How can you ensure your video will perform well and populate on relevant Showcase Pages to ensure the right people are seeing and engaging with your content?

My recommendation is to hone in on who your competitors are, or someone whose content you admire and that gets a lot of traction, and do some recon. Since videos are ranked by popularity on these pages, check out what populates first when you search for a basic tag like #fitness or #makeup. Make a note of the thumbnail they’ve chosen, the title of the video, the length of the video, whether or not they reply to their comments, how many CTAs (call to action) they list in the description – everything.

Get inspired, and then get to implementing some of these choices on your own content and see what sticks! All in all, don’t stress – this update just means we have to start tagging smarter, not necessarily working harder.

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