YouTube’s rolling out some new profile rings to help signify both new Stories and active live-streams, in order to help guide users to the latest content from creators that they’re interested in.

As you can see in these examples, YouTube’s rolling out two new types of profile rings, one with a ‘Live’ marker and one without, to signify the different types of content. You’ll be able to access Stories and Live by tapping on the profile image.

It’s another way to maximize awareness of YouTube Live and Stories, which, while they’re seemingly a lesser consideration in the app, have helped to improve connection between creators and their audiences by providing another content option.

Which is part of YouTube’s broader plan to incorporate more common social app functions into the app, in order to make it a more comprehensive and engaging creator option. In addition to this, YouTube has also recently made its Community Tab available to more channels, while it’s also added Shorts, Reactions and other familiar social media platform options to its offerings.

The more options YouTube can add in, the more it effectively enhances its offering for creators, and with YouTube also providing far better monetization potential, it would make sense, then, for creators to utilize these tools to build their YouTube presence, as opposed to focusing on other apps.

In addition to this, YouTube’s also now lowering the threshold for the use of its Mentions feature.

Mentions lets you include the username of another channel in your video’s title or description, with the other channel then getting notified of the mention in their inbox.

Previously, this option was only available to channels with 500 subscribers, but now, YouTube will enable all channels to use the mentions feature in their process.

That could be a good way to spark collaborations in the app, while also helping to get your videos on the radar of relevant creators, which could then see them amplify your content.

Channels can also switch off mentions if they’d prefer.