YouTube has announced a new set of comment filters within YouTube Studio, which will make it easier for creators and brands to identify key video responses of interest.
As explained by YouTube:
"Comments can be a powerful way for you to continue the conversation from your videos and build a community with your audience. Over the past two years, we’ve introduced a number of new ways to help you manage conversations within your community including creator hearts, comment pinning, and a new setting to hold potentially inappropriate comments for review. Today, we’re launching new comment search filters in YouTube Studio. This is the top feature request we get from creators, and we hope it makes it easier to find and respond to the comments that are most important to you."
As you can see in the above example, within YouTube Studio, you'll now be able to filter your video comments by the following categories:
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Response status - Have I already responded to this comment?
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Contains question - Does the comment contain a question?
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Subscriber count - Does the commenter have at least 1K/10K/100K/1M/10M subs?
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Subscriber status - Is the commenter publicly subscribed to me?
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Member status - Is the commenter a member?
There are some interesting options here, enabling creators to address the most important queries - or at least, those that are most likely to drive more engagement based on their reply.
The update also addresses a previous issue with YouTube's comment search functionality:
"Previously, searching by keyword only showed you comments with an exact match (so searching "subs" would only find "subs"). With this update, you'll see search results beyond exact match (so now you’ll also see "subscriber" or "subscribers" for that same search)."
It's an interesting approach to comment moderation. Some of the more popular YouTube channels can see thousands of comments on each of their videos, making it impossible to address each one. This will enable them to maintain engagement with key fans, while also maximizing their time.
It would actually be interesting to see similar filters applied to other channels - Facebook, for example, is now utilizing a similar approach with its 'Top Fan' and other Page engagement badges. Being able to filter your post comments by similar parameters as above could help maximize engagement - and thus, reach, via Facebook's algorithm.
Either way, it's an interesting consideration for your YouTube moderation.
To use the new search filters, you need to open up YouTube Studio on desktop. Then, from the left menu, select the "Comments" tab and use the filter bar at the top of the page. And as shown above, you can combine different filters to narrow your search for specific comments even further.
