YouTube Channels Can Now be Linked to Google+ Profiles

Google on Monday announced even more Google+ integration for YouTube that allows you to link your channel with a Google+ profile, and still keep your channel name. Although the company is still pushing out the prompt to all its users, if you want to opt in right now, you can do so in your YouTube account settings.

Since August, YouTube has been giving select users the ability to change their identity on their YouTube channel to match their Google+ profile. Soon, everyone on YouTube will be prompted to do the same:

If you want, you can still keep your channel name. It all depends on how you built your brand: if your YouTube channel’s name is more popular than the one you were given at birth, then go with that one. If you prefer to market your own personal brand, then Google is urging you to switch to the Google+ one.

In fact, Google goes one step further with its suggestion:

While using a full name from a Google+ profile might work well for a creator who wants to build their brand as an individual, this simply doesn’t work if you don’t want a full name on your channel. If you run a channel with a name like BlueXephos or VlogBrothers, you should create a Google+ page (as opposed to a profile) with that name.

But Google+ pages don’t allow for this. but Google says that feature is coming “in the coming weeks.” Also coming will be advanced Google+ page management features that let up to 50 people manage a single Google+ page, or a single person to manage up to 50 Google+ pages, which will all supposedly nicely work with YouTube channels linked to Google+ pages.