YouTube Adds New Comment Filters, Highlights for Live-Streams

YouTube’s added some new search filters to help channel managers stay on top of engagement opportunities, while it’s also rolling out its automated highlights for live-streams, which will give you more ways to utilize your content.

First off, YouTube's looking to make it easier to manage your channel engagement by enabling creators to filter video responses based on the latest replies, with “New replies to your response”, and the option to sort comments by “Newest,” ensuring that you can stay on top of the latest discussions inspired by your clips.

So now, you’ll be able to ensure that you continue ongoing discussions after you’ve replied, while you’ll also be able to see the latest comments on any of your clips.

That’ll help in maximizing engagement, and community interaction, and while these may seem relatively minor updates for most channels, for those with a lot of comments, these could be significant elements within their broader strategic approach.

You can use the new reply filter options in combination with other response filters to further refine your search, while you can also now save these as default filters on the mobile version of YouTube Studio.

As explained by YouTube:

“Up until now, creators could save default filters on Studio Desktop, but this didn't exist on Studio Mobile. We're happy to share that we're launching this so you can pick your preferred default view of comments throughout Studio.”

So, more ways to manage channel replies, with enhanced filtering and settings to help highlight opportunities.

YouTube’s also rolling out its new automated Shorts creation process for live-streams, which will select segments from your live broadcasts for potential Shorts clips.

As you can see in this example, now, after completing your live-stream, YouTube will automatically extract a selection of highlights, which you’ll then be able to publish as Shorts, if you choose, to help promote your streams.

“This feature will be available in the mobile app, and you can preview the short video in the recap screen upon ending the stream. We hope this enhances productivity in sharing stream highlights through short-form content.”

YouTube first announced this at its “Made On” event earlier in the month, and it’s now testing it within the live environment.

Could be another way to maximize your content creation efforts.

Finally, YouTube’s also improving contextual search for Connected TV viewers, which will mean more refined discovery in the YouTube TV app.

“Up until now, if a search query was initiated from a channel page when watching YouTube on TV, results from across YouTube would be returned to the viewer. Now, we're bringing contextual search to big screens so that relevant results from the channel will be returned first. This brings parity to the functionality that currently exists on desktop.”

Connected TV is a key, growing opportunity for YouTube, and the more it’s able to integrate its regular app functionality into the bigger screen view, the more it will be able to customize the experience.

Some relatively minor, but handy updates from YouTube this week, which could help in your planning process.