In this post, we are going to explore the TubeBuddy free features and how it’s gonna improve your channel growth and productivity.
I know most of the YouTubers are aware of the TubeBuddy plugin and even TubeBuddy has checklist page for the free features.
If you haven’t checked the page yet, here’s the TubeBuddy free features checklist.
But the problem is it’s quite challenging for a new users and having a hard time understanding the functionality of the feature.
Most of the users don’t know how to leverage the TubeBuddy free features to make the most out of it, and how to access it from the YouTube dashboard.
That’s why I put down a complete list of TubeBuddy free features and its benefits in this post.
When I say TubeBuddy free features, it’s completely FREE without any limitations and restrictions.
TubeBuddy has 67+ features and out of which, 30 features comes for free with limitations. Out of 30 features, 19 are completely FREE and that’s what we are going see in this detailed post.
All you need to do is to spend a little time to make yourself familiar with TubeBuddy free features. So that you can easily do video optimization, channel promotion and bring more organic traffic to your YouTube channel.
Table of Contents
What is TubeBuddy?
TubeBuddy is a YouTube certified plugin designed especially for YouTubers to improve channel traffic, subscriber, views, and productivity. Moreover, it works on top of the YouTube dashboard interface so it comes handy when you upload and edit videos on YouTube studio.
If you haven’t installed yet, here’s my detailed guide on how to install TubeBuddy in just 2 minutes.
Install it and follow me along. It’s gonna be very useful hands-on when you explore the features along with me.
TubeBuddy FREE Features
As mentioned, TubeBuddy has 18+ free features and all features are listed under 4 different categories.
They are
- Productivity tools
- Video SEO
- Channel Promotion
- Data and Research
Let’s go over those categories and explore the features one by one!
Productivity Tools
The ultimate goal of this productivity tool category is to reduce the time you spent on the YouTube dashboard.
#1 Upload Checklist
This feature helps you to validate your new video upload against your upload checklist. Upload checklist is one of the must have tools for YouTubers.
As soon as you are done with video content, I know you are so urged to hit the publish button. Because of this urge, you might forget to update important information about your video such as tags, add a call to action links on the description, enable the monetization, adding video to the playlist, adding end screen, cards.
But if you have the handy checklist on the upload screen, you’ll never miss updating important video information.
TubeBuddy upload checklist will automatically display on the right side when you upload videos to YouTube. You can mark one by one after updating the information.
It has a set of 10 default checklists but you can also re-order, add, edit or delete the checklist as per your wish on this checklist page.
#2 Quick Edit Tool Bar
Quick edit toolbar helps you to easily navigate between videos right from the video info page.
Let’s say you’re editing a video info for one of your videos, on the right side you can see this quick edit toolbar display the list of videos you published before and after this video in the form of a vertical scrollbar.
If you want to update any of these videos from the list, you just need to click on the video and it’ll take you directly to that video editing page rather than moving back again to the dashboard and scroll down & find the video that you want to update.
You almost reduced 5+ clicks to just one-click with this simple quick edit tool bar.
#3 Quick Links Menu
This feature makes your navigation much easier from the dashboard as well as from the individual videos.
As soon as you install TubeBuddy, you can see the icon at the top right corner. When you click on it, it gives you quick access to most useful YouTube links such as dashboard, my videos, comments, etc., as well as TubeBuddy links such as keyword explorer, tag finder, topic planner, etc.,
You can also find the quick links on the My Videos page for easy navigation to video watch time, audience retention, earnings, etc,.
Just hover the mouse on the video and you can see the TubeBuddy icon.
Just click on it and go to Quick Links tab to get easy access to video-specific links such as Traffic sources, subscribers, cards, earnings.
#4 Emoji Picker
This feature helps you to insert emojis to YouTube video titles, descriptions, tags, and comments on the fly.
You can find this Emoji icon popping out while you upload videos on the info and settings page.
When you click on the smiley, it list 100+ emojis in the dropdown.
You can also find this emoji icon when you are typing reply to someone’s comment or add a new comment.
Just click on the emojis and it gets added to the comment box.
Here’s a detailed blog post on how to insert emojis on YouTube title and description.
#5 COPPA Center
Recently, YouTube launched a YouTube for Kids app that is designed specially for kids. If you want to list your videos under YouTube kids stream, you need to mark your video as “Made for Kids” during upload.
This COPPA Center feature split and list the videos Made for kids and Not made for kids in two tabs for easy audit.
To access this feature, go to YouTube channel videos, under the MISC tools you can find the COPPA center.
Just click and it automatically separate your videos as shown below
#6 Comment Formatting
My personal opinion is YouTube needs to improve the comment box and add at least basic formatting icons to make the comment box user friendly.
Bonus Tip: Here are YouTube comments tips every YouTuber show know.
You can add some formats such as bold, italics and underline in the YouTube comment box.
For instance, to make the text bold you need to use asterisks before and after the text and you should follow a similar approach for italics and underline but with different special characters. Remembering the characters to format the text is a nightmare.
Thanks to TubeBuddy for making the formatting stuffs much easier. TubeBuddy adds special formatting icons near the comment box.
You can access this feature when you type YouTube comment on YouTube or channel dashboard.
Just enter your comment, select the text that you want to format, and click on the respective icon(bold, italic or underline).
It also shows formatting preview below your comments.
#7 Advanced Video Embed
To get some extra traffic you should embed your videos on your blog or forums such as Quora.
YouTube default embed option has very limited features and you need to manually make some changes in the HTML code if you want to adjust the embed size, autoplay, hide controls, etc.,
TubeBuddy offers advanced embedding options and automatically generate the embed code based on your selections.
To access this feature, go to YouTube My Videos, hover the mouse over the video that you want to embed.
Click on the TubeBuddy icon, under the Tools section you can find “Advanced embed”. Tap it.
Select the video size from the dropdown, enter the start and end time(if you want to trim the video when embed), and check the respective boxes to use the options.
Note: It’s a great TubeBuddy free feature that comes without any limitation.
#8 Video Topic Planner
Most of the YouTubers including me spend a few hours in a week to come up with the next video topic ideas, do keyword research, and skim through the comments.
Most of them take notes in their mind and barely note it down. So either they forget or having hard time to recollect when they need it.
TubeBuddy has an in-built video topic planner where you can add the keywords or topics in your mind and retrieve it whenever needed.
To access the video topic planner, just click on the TubeBuddy icon on the top right corner.
Click on the “Video Topic Planner”, it’ll open a pop-up where you can see the topics you added already. Click on the “Add New Topic” to add new keywords or ideas to the planner.
Note: It’s one of the TubeBuddy free features that come with a limitation of adding 5 keywords.But for me, it’s still worth it so I included this in the TubeBuddy free features checklist.
Video SEO Tools
Let’s explore the free features in the Video SEO category!
#9 View and Copy Video Tags
This feature gives access to view tags of your competitor videos. Long back YouTube decided to hide the video tags on the watch page. But TubeBuddy can reveal all the YouTube video tags.
Bonus Tip: Here are some other ways to view Youtube video tags.
To avail this feature, just go to YouTube and click any video that you want to see the tags.
On the right side, you can find the video analytics section where you can see the video tags.
#10 Tag Rankings
Do you want to measure how well your tags are performing on the YouTube search results ?
Do you want to see the tag ranks of your competitor videos?
TubeBuddy displays the tag rankings for any videos on YouTube.
To see this feature, open the YouTube video page and under the tags section you can find “Show search rankings”. Click on it.
#11 Tag Sorter
YouTube removed the tags sorting feature long ago. But you can still sort the tags by ranks or by drag and drop with the help of TubeBuddy.
Bringing the best-ranking tags to the front can help videos to rank higher in the SERP.
To access this feature, go to YouTube dashboard → My Videos → Click on the video that you want to sort the tag.
It’ll take you to the video details page where you can find SORT option under the YouTube tags box as shown below.
Just click on the SORT button.
It opens a pop up where you can auto-sort by tag rank or you can do a drag and drop.
Finally, click on “Apply and Close”
Promotion Tools
Let’s explore the TubeBuddy free features under the promotion tools category.
#12 Video 2 Video Promotion
When you decide to promote your channel to increase the traffic, I would suggest to first start your promotion strategy within your channel.
If you’re adding new videos, you would have linked your old videos either in the description, cards, or end screen but most of the time you forget to promote your new videos across the old videos.
This feature helps you do such a promotion. When you upload a new video, you can easily add the new video link to all your old videos descriptions.
Doing this manually will take more than a couple of days but with the help of TubeBuddy, you can get it done within a few minutes.
Let’s see how to do that.
Go to YouTube Studio → Videos. Hover the mouse over the promotion video, click on the TubeBuddy Icon.
Select the option Vid2vid promotion under the Promote menu.
It’ll open a pop-up on the dashboard. Click on Continue.
Customize the text message and select where you want to insert the text to all your old videos.
Click continue and select “Start promotion”.
#13 Share Tracker
Leveraging the power of social media is another type of promotion strategy to bring more traffic to your YouTube videos.
When you’re doing such promotions, you need to visit plenty of social media websites(Facebook, Twitter, Mix, Reddit, Instagram, Pinterest) and you lose the track of which videos you promoted and on what social media you promoted.
TubeBuddy has an in-built social media tracker where you can easily navigate to the social media sites by just clicking on the social media icon. It also automatically updates the promotion status on the tracker.
So that you can keep a track of each video promotion status and access it anytime from the YouTube dashboard.
Isn’t it cool? How to access this feature?
Go to YouTube Studio → Videos. Hover the mouse over the promotion video, click on the TubeBuddy Icon.
Select the option Share Tracker under the Promote menu.
It opens a share tracker pop up. Click on the respective social media icon to start sharing and it automatically updates your promotion status after you shared.
You can also manually update it, if you not shared video from TubeBuddy social share tracker.
#14 Pick A Winner
Giveaways are the next level of promotion strategy to hook the existing subscribers & viewers and keep them coming back to your channel.
Most of the YouTubers ask their viewers to hit the like button and leave a comment on their video and say that they’re going to give a gift to the winners by lucky draw in the next video.
For those type of giveaways, you should pick random winners right from the YouTube dashboard in-front of your viewers.
How to pick random winners?
Go to YouTube Studio → Videos. Hover the mouse over the video where you want to pick random winners, click on the TubeBuddy Icon.
Select the option Pick A Winner under the Promote menu.
Click on Pick A Winner.
It just picks a winner within a few seconds. You can do this several times if you are giving gifts to more number of people.
Data and Research Tools
Let’s explore the TubeBuddy free features under the data and research tools category.
#15 Social Monitor
Do you want to know how many shares your video got on Twitter?
Are you interested to see how many people are talking about your video on Reddit?
You can see that from YouTube Dashboard.
But before that, you need to integrate your twitter account with TubeBuddy. It’s just a one-time set up.
Wondering how to access this social monitor feature?
Go to YouTube Studio → Videos. Hover the mouse over the video that you want to see the social monitor status, click on the TubeBuddy Icon.
Select the option Social Monitor under the Promote menu.
You can see the stats in the pop-up.
#16 Language Analysis
It’s another awesome TubeBuddy free feature to know the language of your viewers which is something you cannot get from the YouTube analytics.
Once you know the viewers’ language you can optimize your video metadata information and add a closed caption for those languages.
Let’s see how to do language analysis.
Go to YouTube Studio → Videos. Hover the mouse over the video which you want to see the language status, click on the TubeBuddy Icon.
In the tools tab, select the option Tag Translator under the Video SEO menu.
You can see the top 5 spoken languages by your channel audiences.
#17 De-Monetization Audit
YouTube nowadays brings so many changes to YPP monetization strategy. They automatically change the status of monetization enabled video to limited ads and won’t let you know by email after the changes made. You’ll get to know only when your revenue decreases.
But most of the time you can enable the monetization after requesting a manual review.
When you have 500+ videos, you definitely can’t check the status of every single video and can’t request manual reviews for all videos one by one.
With TubeBuddy free demonetization audit feature you can check all your videos monetization status within a few seconds.
How to check my demonetization videos?
Go to YouTube Studio → Videos. Below the Channel Videos label, you’ll find the Demon check option under Misc tools. Click on it.
You’ll get a pop up as shown below. Just click START.
If it finds any demonetized video, you can request a review directly from the pop-up.
#18 Comments Word Cloud
Do you want to understand your viewers pulse or just curious to know what people are saying about your videos?
Go to YouTube Studio → Comments.
Click on the word cloud icon as shown below
You can see the most commonly used words in your comment section in the form of a cloud.
#19 Channel Analytics
Do you want to know the detailed status of your competitor’s channel?
How many videos your competitor channel has?
How many videos have been uploaded in the last 30 days?
How many views did they get so far?
Want to grab their channel keywords?
All you need to do is just visit your competitor channel page and you can find all the above info.
Here’s a TubeBuddy free features checklist infographic for a glimpse
Frequently Asked Questions
I’ve given a list of TubeBuddy free features but there are several other useful features are available in the upgrade plan. If you already started making money on YouTube then I highly recommend to go for PRO or STAR plan to increase your channel income. Here are the checklist features of the PRO plan.
TubeBuddy is available on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera. TubeBuddy app is available in Playstore as well.
Yeah! They do have. Please do check out my post on how to upgrade TubeBuddy with a huge discount
If you haven’t installed TubeBuddy yet, just go ahead and install it.You are just a click away to improve your YouTube channel growth.
I hope you enjoyed this post. It took 15+ hours to complete this blog post and if you spend 15 seconds to share this post with your friends and peers, I’ll be so glad!
Please do let me know if you have any questions! I’m more than happy to answer your questions.