The social tool in your client portal can publish videos straight to your YouTube channel. You connect once with Google's official sign-in, and after that you can post or schedule videos alongside your Facebook and Instagram content.
Before you connect
- A YouTube channel for your business
- The Google account that manages that channel
- Your Google password handy (you enter it on Google's site, never in the portal)
Connect your channel with Google sign-in
- Open the Social area of your portal and choose to add a YouTube connection.
- A Google sign-in window opens. Sign in with the Google account that manages your channel.
- If Google asks you to pick between accounts or channels, choose the channel you want to connect.
- Review Google's access screen and allow the connection.
That's it. Your channel now shows up as a connected account, and you can pick it as a target in the post composer.
YouTube is video only
Unlike Facebook or Instagram, YouTube does not accept photo or text-only posts. If you select your YouTube channel as a target, your post must include a video. The composer also cannot mix videos and images in the same post, so keep video posts and photo posts separate.
How your post turns into a YouTube video
When you select YouTube in the composer, a few YouTube-only fields appear. Here is how everything maps over:
- Video title - comes from the title field. If you leave it blank, the first line of your post text becomes the title.
- Description - your post text becomes the video description.
- Tags - optional keywords that help YouTube understand what your video is about.
- Playlist - optionally add the video to one of your channel's playlists.
Custom thumbnails need a phone-verified channel
YouTube only allows custom thumbnails on channels that have verified a phone number. If your thumbnail is not showing up on published videos, this is almost always why. Verification is free and only takes a couple of minutes.
- Go to youtube.com/verify and sign in with the account that manages your channel.
- Follow the prompts to get a verification code by text message or phone call.
- Enter the code YouTube sends you.
Once your channel is verified, custom thumbnails you set in the composer will upload with your videos.
Daily upload limits
Google limits how many videos outside tools can upload to YouTube each day. For this tool, that works out to a handful of videos per day, and the limit is shared across the whole tool, not just your account. That means an upload can occasionally fail even if you only posted one video that day.
Thumbnail A/B testing stays in YouTube Studio
YouTube has a feature called "Test & compare" that tries out different thumbnails or titles to see which one performs best. It only works inside YouTube Studio. YouTube does not open it to any outside tool, including this portal, so if you want to run those tests, do it directly in Studio. See YouTube Help for details.
Questions?
If your channel will not connect or a video will not publish, reach out through the contact form. It is a one-person shop, so you will get a reply as soon as possible, usually within one business day.