YouTube engineers are constantly tweaking the user interface and user experience of YouTube. That means changes to YouTube in big broad strokes or in small, incremental steps.
For an everyday YouTube user, it means expecting the UI, UX, or both to change without any warning.
As an example, I have CSS Dev Conf’s YouTube channel up and running, but I am still trying to perfect my settings.
One of those settings or tasks is to add links to our other social media accounts from the YouTube channel page.
In the past, this had been a simple process of hovering over the edit channel banner and select Edit Links.
But that’s changed–not by a whole lot–but enough to make me waste time trying to track down how to do something that was once so basic.
Here are the new steps to add social or outbound links to your YouTube channel:
Step 1. Log into Your Channel
Log into YouTube and head to your YouTube Channel.
Step 2. Select Channel Settings
To get to Channel Settings, click the gear icon underneath your channel banner. A modal or dialog box appears.
Step 3. Select Advance Customizing Features
Select “Customize the layout of your channel” in the dialog box. This is the new wrinkle YouTube has added to add social media links.
Step 4. Choose Edit Links
Closing the dialog box, go to the upper right-hand corner of the YouTube banner and select “Edit Links”
Step 4. Add Social Media Links
Start adding links! Once you save your new links, they will appear on top of the banner artwork in the lower righthand corner.
That’s all there is to it!
Thanks to this change YouTube made, I lost at least 30 minutes trying figure out something so basic. That may not sound like a lot, but those 30 minutes felt like an eternity as if I was losing my mind because I had done this exact thing to the Non Breaking Space Show channel last year.
