Username Feature Coming to YouTube for Creating Unique Handles

 You are already familiar with what a username is and how to use handles on social media platforms.

image from Blog.YouTube blog

The king of usernames/handles Twitter successfully forced every next social media giant to give users a unique identity by allowing them to create a username that they can use to tag and share their profiles all over the platform. A brand should focus to increase YouTube subscribers to take advantage of the new features YouTube is rolling out. As of now, YouTube is growing at a pace that we never thought of in its initial days. YouTube is a giant and every person watches videos on this platform. If as a business you want to leverage the benefits of this platform, then you should focus on having quality videos specifically suited for the audience of this social media platform.

Since you can use the @handle and username feature on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok as well, YouTube to roll out the unique handles feature for channels so creators can have their own unique handle/username and the audience can tag them in comments too.

Viewers will be able to see the unique username of every channel so they can see whether it is the original channel or an impersonator (fake) account.

Sharing the news in a blog post, YouTube said:

“We want to ensure creators can craft an identity as unique as their content while giving viewers the confidence that they are interacting with their favorite creators,” 

This new feature for creating handles will be rolled out this week and will gradually be available to large channels first then to others depending on their activity, popularity, and more aspects.

Users who already have claimed a personalized channel URL will get the same handle as their URL and owners will be able to change it later.

“When a creator chooses their handle, we’ll also create a matching URL (ex: youtube.com/@handle) so creators can easily direct people to their content when they’re not on YouTube. If a channel already has a personalized URL, there’s no need to update links: they’ll automatically be redirected to the new, handle-based URL to create a better, more unified presence for creators on YouTube.” Youtube blog post shared further.

You will be able to see YouTube handle in the following sections of YouTube:

• Under channel name with @handle
• In the URL after YouTube.com/@handle
• Above the channel header on mobile
• In the comments using @ to tag someone
• In the shorts just like TikTok
• In the Youtube video descriptions

It means, Youtubers can now tag themselves and interact with the audience more easily than ever before and viewers can easily find a channel or tag a channel without memorizing a youtube channel link or profile picture.

This might be the most awaited feature on Youtube that is so common but not introduced as Google doesn't feel a need for this feature.

However, seeing rivals such as TikTok and Instagram, Youtube just introduced the usernames feature that they are calling the Youtube Handles feature.