Sooner or later, most successful YouTubers run into the same question: How do you hire a YouTube channel manager to take care of all the video admin?
Anyone who runs a channel knows that content production is just a fraction of the work. Tasks like uploading and scheduling videos, writing descriptions, and doing all the YouTube SEO research to get your content to rank take up loads of time.
Once your channel grows beyond a certain limit, you just about have to start outsourcing parts of your video creation process. Channel management and SEO are high on the list of tasks that you can easily delegate to take back your time.
Here’s your guide to hiring a YouTube channel manager.
Quick Facts
- Channel managers take care of all channel admin tasks – from descriptions and comment moderation to thumbnail testing and analytics.
- Pricing is per-video (basics: $25+), per-hour ($30+) or as a subscription (vary widely).
- Freelancers are sometimes cheaper, while companies provide more reliable, more varied services.
Keep reading for the full scoop!
What Does a YouTube Channel Manager Do?
Ultimately, the purpose of hiring a YouTube manager for your channel is to improve your rankings, grow your subscriber counts, and increase engagement (including watch time). It’s also to free up time to focus on your overall content strategy. Their job is to help you take care of all the administrative tasks that come with running a channel.
Basics: Metadata & Graphics
On the most basic level, this means uploading your videos and adding optimized metadata to improve their visibility. These include tags, hashtags, video descriptions, key moments, chapters, as well as captions and subtitles.
In addition, they might take care of designing and adding graphical elements such as thumbnails and end screens. Most professional channel managers will do some level of A/B testing – trying out different versions of them to see what resonates most with your audience:
A/B testing thumbnails is work – but can have an outsize impact.
Scheduling & Community Management
Another part of a channel managers’ job is to schedule releases for just the right day and time, and to create and manage playlists on your channel. They can also handle community posts – announcements, quizzes, polls and so on – for you, while ensuring consistency in your personal brand voice. This increasingly includes membership content.
As community managers, they also take care of comment moderation. This involves replying to viewers and deleting offensive comments left by trolls.
This isn’t just good for audience engagement – it also means that you don’t have to deal with that negativity. Even if you aren’t already stressed, these attacks can harm your motivation, and may well contribute to feelings of creator burnout.
They’ll also coordinate with the rest of the team to get cross-platform promo underway. This includes making sure that shorts and other teasers are posted on time on other platforms, like Instagram or LinkedIn (depending on where your target audience is).
Analytics, Setup, and SEO
On a more technical level, a channel manager will keep an eye on your video analytics, especially audience engagement. They’ll tell you where your content does well, and where it needs improvement. With specialist tools – especially if it’s a company – they can get you deeper insights than you could with YouTube Studio Analytics and solopreneur tools like TubeBuddy or VidIQ.
If you’re just getting started out with a professional channel – or want to launch a new one – a channel manager can also take care of the entire set-up process.
Finally, channel managers can handle some aspects of YouTube SEO, that is, Search Engine Optimization. This helps you appear in Google results, for one, but YouTube itself is also one of the world’s most-used search engines. Somewhat frustratingly, the algorithm for the top search results and recommendations changes constantly.
A channel manager with video SEO knowledge can help you navigate the platform’s algorithm and increase the visibility of your content. With keyword research, they help you target the right topics and incorporate them into your video content.
Some of these YouTube tasks can be automated, true. But somebody has to manage that too – to create the automation workflows in the first place, for example.
How to Find a YouTube Manager for Your Channel
First, determine exactly which channel management tasks you want to outsource. What skills and how much experience does your ideal hire need?
The larger your channel is, the more likely it is that you’ll have separate specialists for each task – different people to focus exclusively on channel administration, YouTube SEO strategy, and content research. People to negotiate, or at least coordinate, collaborations and sponsorships.
When you’re just starting to outsource, though, the ideal is to find someone with solid all-round expertise.
Where to Find Channel Managers
For the most part, these people are freelancers. You can easily find them on freelancing platforms like Upwork, PeoplePerHour, or Fiverr. Just write up a comprehensive job description, post it on a platform, and wait for applicants to come to you. Making sure they’re a good fit is a different story, though.
Companies, too, offer YouTube channel management services. There are a few advantages to this kind of offer:
- Reliability: if your usual manager falls sick, they’ll have someone to cover for them.
- Vetting: the channel managers are pre-selected and trained, so you can expect higher baseline quality
- Strategic: Companies tend to be better with long-term strategy planning
A Note on Job Titles
You should know that people we’ve called “channel managers” here actually comes under a lot of job titles. Some do call themselves channel managers, others advertise themselves as account managers, virtual assistants, social media managers, or YouTube SEO experts.
Some work more like a classic talent manager or business manager. At the more granular level, they might simply be (SEO) writers with the requisite skills.
Companies are more likely to offer “YouTube channel management” – but what’s included will vary.
Vetting and Interviewing
Once you have a few candidates on your list, vet them thoroughly. Check their websites, and take a good look at their portfolio, reviews, and client testimonials. Do all of these show that the candidate is good at what you’ll be asking them to do? Is there a proven track record?
When you’ve narrowed down the field, interview people personally. This will help you make sure they have the right skills, and that you get along with them on a personal level. In addition, you can ask your top contenders to do a (paid) trial job, which gives you a first-hand sample of their work – and of how well you can work together.
One last note: The times being what they are, make sure that your candidate channel manager uses automation and AI responsibly.
How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Channel Manager?
Generally, you’ll see three different models out there: per-video pricing, hourly pricing, and subscriptions. Either way, rates for trustworthy channel managers start at $25 per video, though many offer volume discounts.
However, prices vary considerably depending on the tasks you expect your channel manager to handle. For example, if you want someone to handle extensive SEO research, along with graphic design and ad campaigns, then rates can quickly rise to $40-75 per hour.
More and more, social media marketing agencies and video editing services are adding channel management to their service portfolio. If you find it as a stand-alone subscription, you’re usually looking at a few dozen to a few hundred dollars a month. More often, it’s part of a larger service offer, which may include things from thumbnail design and A/B testing to handling merchandise, even full-on channel strategy consulting. For such a full-service offer, expect at least $500 to $1,000 monthly.
As YouTube keeps adding more community and monetization features, of course, the possible tasks of a channel manager are also expanding. Stream chat moderation is just one example.
How to Add a Manager to My YouTube Channel
Once you’ve settled on a candidate for the job, you can add them as a channel manager in YouTube Studio.
Under Settings, click on Permissions and then Invite (see the picture below). Then, you can enter the email address of your new team member, and select the type of access you want to grant them.
Depending on the tasks they’ll be assigned, you’ll want to make them either a manager, an editor, or an editor with limited permissions.
Did you create a new YouTube channel from your existing account? Then you might still be using what Google calls a brand account. If you try to set channel permissions in Studio, you’ll see the following screen instead:
Brand accounts only have owner and manager roles, unlike the more fine-grained permissions that Studio makes available. That’s very useful if you want a trusted manager to have broad control over the channel, and it also gets around some of the limitations of Studio permissions.
Still, you can choose to move permissions to YouTube Studio to limit a manager’s access. If you only need somebody to work on your metadata, or just view analytics data, they don’t need the ability to permanently delete your videos.
The Bottom Line
Adding a channel manager to your YouTube team can help you save tons of time when it comes to uploading and handling your videos, especially if you run multiple channels.
Finding the right person or company for the job will take some time and effort, but it’s ultimately worth it. They will help you be more productive and efficient, which lets you take your channel to the next level!
FAQs
Full YouTube channel management services are typically $500–$1,000.
Absolutely. You can free up a lot of time by outsourcing channel management, and get the job done professionally by skilled managers.
Yes. You can free up time and get professional results by hiring a channel manager. They can also shield you from a lot of the negativity.
Sure. You just have to give them permission through YouTube Studio.
The basics are video descriptions, uploading videos and thumbnails, scheduling, comment moderation, and often A/B testing. Channel managers nowadays also handle YouTube community features like chats, memberships, and community posts.
