If you’re creating a web series, you’re likely uploading content to YouTube. While this is a great platform to reach new views, if you’re justthinking about YouTube as a platform, you’re doing yourself an injustice. Instead, it pays to think of YouTube as a community. Today at BlogWorld New York, this was one of the topics discussed by moderator Joseph Warshaw and panelists Maria Diokno, Colin Evans, and Donnell Riley at their session, “Social Media for Web Series.”

Growing Your Web Series Through the YouTube Community

Because YouTube is such a large and open community, you can easily connect with others in your niche to grow your own subscriber numbers. The key, according to Joseph, is to network in a smart way, using connections to grow slowly. If you have 2,000 subscribers, start by connecting with people in the YouTube community with 4,000 subscribers – not a million subscribers. As you grow, you an approach people who are more popular, but it makes sense to grow slowly.

Reaching Out to Local People

Don’t forget that even though YouTube is a huge community, you can also make it very “small.” Reach out to local users, because you can easily collaborate with these people. This is beneficial to both of you, since you can easily cross promote on one another’s channels. To go along with this tip, you can also reach out to local aspiring actors, who will often jump at the chance to be a guest on your web series. So, find your local community on YouTube and connect with these people.

This is just a small piece of the tips and tricks these panelists discussed. Want to hear the entire discussion? Pick up a virtual ticket today, and you’ll get recordings of this and all other sessions from BlogWorld New York 2012.