YouTube Will Use Handles to Give Channels a Unique Identifier, Changing How the YouTube Marketing Game Is Played

The new tool in the platform will significantly improve navigation; this is an update creators and marketers have been waiting for a long time.

After years of avoiding the inevitable, YouTube will finally introduce the change to facilitate interaction between users and content creators. These new ‘handles’ will be a custom link to a specific account.

Your YouTube user profile will soon feature a unique “@channelname” handle, similar to other social apps like Twitter and TikTok.

Users will have the opportunity to create a non-replicable handle to be tagged in videos, comments, collaborations, etc. YouTube ensures that it will serve to consolidate the brand of creators with a good presence on the platform and help distinguish channels that are growing.

With the arrival of handles, it will no longer be necessary to have an account with hundreds of thousands of followers to obtain an exclusive link. Now, it is available to anyone who wishes to use it. Unlike the channel name, this identifier cannot be copied by another person who registers in the future.

The company reported through its official blog that users would have approximately four weeks to choose. If they have not set aside their handle by that point, YouTube will automatically assign one to them. Official accounts with preexisting identifiers will receive corresponding handles without undergoing the process.

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According to YouTube, the selection of identifiers will be made hierarchically in the coming weeks, prioritizing those accounts with the most presence. It is partly meant to prevent servers from crashing due to excessive traffic processing requests.

As competition against TikTok intensifies, similar problems become more common. And although fake accounts have always existed on YouTube, the mass production of short videos in recent seasons has highlighted the importance of marking content more effectively, trying to avoid plagiarism and re-uploads that have become so common.

A specific handle for bookmarking will allow users to verify the original source with just one click since the goal is to make the handles so popular that you can recognize any well-known account immediately. Just like the names of the most successful YouTube channels usually are.

These handles are going to change the game. YouTube Premier Partners like Mrkt360 and other marketing agencies are beginning to adapt their digital strategies to plan for the new changes.

While there is still no specific information other than YouTube’s comments on how the algorithm will work with handles, many speculate that it will function similarly to TikTok. This means lesser-known accounts will have the ability to quickly gain traction regardless of subscriber count, which means new brands looking to grow their presence on the platform should look into digital strategies surrounding the handles once they are live.

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