I’ve written several articles on the high level ideas of becoming a Twitch broadcaster and getting into the world of livestreaming for gaming. One thing that I’ve noticed though is that there’s quite a few people who livestream but don’t really understand many of the social media tools out there. They might use systems like Twitter or have Facebook pages, but those exist as barebones links that they add to their profile/channel. Yet they might wonder why exactly aren’t they seeing an explosion of new followers and/or viewers to their channel. What this post will attempt to do is bridge the ideas between social media and using it to grow your channels.
Before going into the ideas of the basics for certain types of social media, I want to establish whom I am, especially because I do not livestream. I am a long time developer who has been in the technology business for 14 years and a gamer who started out from the humble days of quarter arcade games and the Atari 2600. I got into programming back when you could buy a magazine in the store and type out a huge block of code to create your own game on a Commodore 64. On top of that aspect, I’ve worked for Demand Media on their Livestrong.com site and have worked with the people who founded Myspace (Intermix) and other people who at one time or another was at Myspace, Yahoo, etc. Back on the Livestrong.com site, I helped grow it during its first year, increasing traffic by 10% through one of our major projects and implemented the first Facebook Connect system in the company. In addition, I’ve worked with numerous social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc. to build other social media services, both for myself and other companies. Although I’m not 100% up-to-date with all the latest trends in social media, I follow the tech scene vigorously as I can and feel pretty confident in my knowledge with it.
Now, that I have that aspect out of the way, I want to delve into some high level concepts in social media. These days I think many people have a general idea about social media and the power it brings. But the ideas behind social media are still pretty vague and constantly being redefined on the specifics. However, there are a few very key elements in social media that make it powerful:
- The idea of “going viral.” This concept occurs when this amorphous cloud known as the internet picks up a trend, which in turn gets broadcast via word of mouth and explodes. The word of mouth aspect occurs because of the tools available from social media that enable the idea to be spread quickly.
- Sharing is a very prominent feature in social media tools. But this is the real key in going viral. Sharing often involves ways to quickly broadcast things like links, information, videos, etc. to friends. The reason it’s such a big key is that the people you share information with generally are those you are very close to or want to be close to and pay a lot of attention to (such as film stars). These relationships in the activity of sharing provide a sense of trust that lead to the acceptance/consuming of the media being shared. Contrast this notion from seeing an odd looking link from a random person who has a nonsensical user handle (many people will realize it’s just spam).
- Community is another term/concept often intermingled with social media. People talk about community but again while the high level idea seems obvious the actual entity might be obscure still. Essentially, the community is the target audience at the center of an application, company, individual, group or whatever. The content partially shapes that community in terms of giving it flavor while the community becomes the voice that bilaterally helps evolve the content.
So those are the key ideas most often associated with social media. One thing I learned from a well respected product management executive mentor in my career is a good principle that helps provide a solid foundation around those elements. He called this concept the “three C’s”. The “three C’s” are content, community and contribution. Here’s how they play out in social media:
- Content – At the core of any product you have content. Content is what attracts people to you. It provides the basic flavor and context and the thing that most likely you are passionate about. In the world of the web, people find content usually through search engines where the content is discovered through SEO (search engine optimization like keywords) or SEM (search engine marketing where you pay for certain keywords to be artificially ranked higher in major search engines). With social media, you can add the broadcasting of social media via things like Tweets, Facebook Likes/Shares/Promotions, etc. to the methods for helping others (or yourself) discover pieces of content.One major aspect to content is that it must be relevant to what you want to do and there needs to be constant creation of content because of how people have a need for consumption. Expectations grow over time about the types of content produced and frequency so consistency often times plays a huge role to the success of a site, etc.
- Community – I talked about community a bit earlier but in relation to the principles of the three C’s, community acts in the role of the type of people that the content attracts. That could range from a topic like gaming or individuals such as a famous actress. But it’s the common element that supports the content and often works together to develop that voice of the content. On the technical side of community, usually there are social elements like comment systems, reviews, Facebook likes, chatrooms, etc. that provide ways for people to interact with each other. Often the community becomes the reason why there ends up being higher rates of return for a site as those technical elements provide means for the community to interact with each and become sticky.
- Contribution – This is a subtle part of the social sphere but it quickly becomes obvious when you point it out. Contribution represents how the community can provide back into the application/content/company or whatever. This aspect can vary in mileage with regards to complexity. For instance, comments are part of the contributions the community does back to the application, etc. It’s cheap content that, for instance, a blog page can receive without the blogger having to do much outside of write the main article. But heavy commented pages might receive high page rankings because of the constant activity on that page as a result of people commenting on a hot topic.More than this though, contribution is a two way mechanism. You can have an application that exist on top of a site that does things with the data that people contribute. A prime example is Livestrong.com’s Daily Plate with the part for people who have Diabetes. People with Diabetes contribute their data by entering the foods the eat, which in turn the Daily Plate can do calculations for the proper amount of sodium and other forms of dietary intake that a diabetic person needs to monitor. In short, you give and you can get back something.
What all these elements add up to that make the best sites or communities come about is what the product executive guy calls “the soul”. It sounds funny but makes a lot of sense. The “soul” behind a product, website, community, company, etc. is the thing that keeps it alive and makes it different. All these elements in the three C’s add up to help create a personality behind this entity. When you look at some of the most successful products, artists, etc. you’ll see that there is always something that makes them stand out and once again you can pinpoint it to the “soul” element.
With these ideas set up as a core foundation for the platform you want to create, how can we make social media work with these things to help build up your platform especially as a game livestreamer? First, we need to examine the big social media tools and define when and where to use them.
Many people these days use Facebook on a personal level for the friends aspect. Others who have managed to create an online presence for themselves might create a Facebook Page as a destination point to help separate their personal presence from their online presence. The main feature behind a Facebook Page is providing an insular mechanism for people with Facebook profiles to receive updates. At the same time, Facebook pages allow you to provide a simple mechanism to allow your community to post back relevant content to you and each other. For old time web users like myself, the Facebook page is just another iteration on the Geocities page.
Two important features of Facebook Pages are likes and events. Likes are critical as it can be used as a way for the person behind the Facebook Page to help improve the standing of other people and pages. You may not exactly want to broadcast your personal likes here but add causes or things that you see important to become visible to other people as they act as a bookmark.
Events are under used in my opinion for Livestreamers but can be an excellent tool. I don’t think events are good for broadcasting on a daily basis your livestreaming schedule. The thing is that people need to sign up for the events so it can become annoying spam. The about section for your Facebook Page would be a better spot to discuss your scheduling (if possible). But the thing with events is that you might consider it an excellent mechanism to remind others for big things that you want to do like a mega give away, a special raiding event, etc. as well as having finer grained control and insight into the participants.
One thing you have to consider though about the way Facebook Pages work is the feed ranking algorithms and the way users can set their preferences for displaying content. Good Facebook Pages will have consistent periodic updates but avoid spamming people’s walls with useless information. Facebook internally will downrank your content if you spam things, especially the same content over and over. In time, you will lose out to other content competing for top spots in people’s feeds, until individual users either set their preferences to ensure they see your feed and/or do more to interact with your page to automagically reinvoke your page’s content back into their feed mix.
Good Facebook Page posts will be ranked higher depending on the elements within the post. For instance, a photo or video tend to take precedence over a link. But if you combine the link with well thought out, well written information, that post will have a higher chance of making it into a person’s feed.
Another important facet to good Facebook Page posts is providing content that people will interact with. Part of the social media experience is the interaction aspect. Facebook will see how a post has lots of activity and try to boost it. But those interacting with the posts will also mark the people as having relevant interest with the Facebook Page, thus causing your posts over time to win out in precedence in a user’s feed. This idea might change as Facebook constantly changes how their algorithms for wall post rankings work. However, I think the essential ideas described above won’t change too much.
One element that Facebook has developed for posts for everyone is the idea of Promoted posts. Promoted posts are similar to the ideas in SEM (they’re calling it FAO or Facebook Ad Optimization) in that you pay tom promote your posts up. I think Promoted posts is roughly $5 and have a life time that is similar to the way many ad campaigns work. For the average gamer, most likely you might not want to go this route. However, for those starting up, FAO is just one manner to help rank your page posts higher in people’s feeds. I would not recommend this unless you have a fair number of likes and want to a particular post to show up on everyone’s feed. But if you have say 10 people who like your page, then FAO is a complete waste of time and money.
Along a similar line, you can actually buy likes to anything on Facebook. There are different companies that offer services like this (no pun intended) but some of the upcoming companies who want to establish their social presence on Facebook often times might buy their likes to give themselves more visibility. For instance, over on fiverr.com, you can see one such guy advertising his service for giving your Facebook page 200+ likes. I’m not a huge advocate of these types of services, but I want to add it into the equation as another possible mechanism for helping to establish yourself if you either feel that you’re struggling or want to move faster in this area.
In general, when it comes to spending money on things such as buying likes, you have to consider weighing the cost vs the benefit (or as we call it in the big time Cost-Benefit Analysis). There are tons of professionals who now make it their careers to analyze these numbers, which are mostly for helping to create conversions (that is, doing an action and receiving an expected response) but I’m not one of those people. That said, you have to consider whether or not the $5 you’d spend on an espresso over at Starbucks can be sacrificed for a bet on visibility. So again I’m just tossing it out there as another option whenever I bring up topics that might involve cost.
Moving back to Facebook, another option like Facebook Pages is Facebook Groups. From my point of view, Groups and Pages function very similarly. I see them as redundant functionally for the most part. If anything, Groups might be more community centered whereas Pages are topic centered. So the contribution factor in Groups are from the community at large whereas Pages the expectation is that the people controlling the page are the primary content creators. The other thing about Groups is that you do have privacy options so you can make a completely walled off community that is invite only.
In relation to gamers/livestreamers, Facebook Groups might be a decent option for guilds or people with subscription access as a member’s only type of house. But if you want a public landing page for constantly updated information that will be mostly controlled by you, then a Facebook Page is your better bet.
The thing to keep in mind is that Facebook really is a closed network in reality. I think because so many people prefer to keep high privacy settings, the world of Facebook tends to be more intimate and revolve around personal relations. While Facebook Pages are more public oriented, I find the community to be more tied around the content and lacking overall coherence whereas Groups feel more intimate overall. I don’t feel that Facebook is the be-all-end-all social network because of this closed network aspect and it isn’t always the best mechanism for spreading the word.
While you might have some friends that share common interests, it’s more than likely that the vast majority of your friends will not share the same level of passion on your hobby. So expecting conversions to occur through your friends via shares and likes probably won’t get you what you want, even if you have tons of friends on Facebook. The conversions from Facebook will occur on the topics from Pages and possibly Groups as those are the areas where other people who do share the same passion will want to spread the word to their 2-3 friends who have a similar interest. That’s where the power of social will come into play. But on average, the discovery mechanism on Facebook is, in my opinion, pretty poor overall, which is why you might not want to put too much effort or faith in it as a means to increase viewership. This is why you will want to look towards other tools to help you with this goal.
I find that Twitter is probably a far more effective discovery mechanism than Facebook. Facebook is more like sharing simple things such as food, important events in your life and humor (as well as the usual rants) with an emphasis more on random discovery. But it really isn’t great for sharing topics as much. On the other hand, because Twitter is more open, less private overall and more topic focused, it performs better in the discovery for information in the public space.
On the surface, some of the functionality behind Twitter and Facebook look the same where you’re just broadcasting information to your followers. In some ways, Twitter is like Facebook Pages (or vice versa) in that you can set up an account without making it personal. By doing that and opening it up, you will have a simple tool to broadcast things to anyone.
There are a number of features from a technical and contextual viewpoint that differentiate it from Facebook and Facebook Pages. Obviously, the character limit on Tweets can be cumbersome at times, but it does force you to be more precise overall. Twitter also will automatically attempt to shorten links to help your character count. Certain image and videos sites can be rendered in a Tweet on their site. But one of the most important things about Twitter that differs from Facebook is that the feed is chronologically sorted.
Facebook’s feed too is chronologically sorted but not all posts make it to the top. In fact, there’s a huge chance that many pieces of information are algorithmically hidden in your feed, even from certain friends. In contrast, Twitter makes no discrimination (at the moment) so with effort, you can backtrack to see almost everything in your feed.
However, Twitter is also far more time sensitive than Facebook. So timing is critical when putting out a Tweet; in short, the eyeballs you really want might not be there unless the follower explicitly goes to your feed to find out what you’re doing. This is where Facebook has a slight advantage because of how Facebook has their notification system. In the case of notifications, Facebook can visually alert people to key updates if they have the preference set. Also, people can go to their Facebook Pages link to see the activity explicitly. So you’ll have to find a good balance between the two when broadcasting information.
Despite the time sensitiveness of Tweets, the thing is that anyone can “hear” them. The best way for people to randomly “hear” them is through the use of the hashtag. The hashtag adds “#” symbol to any one keyword (for multi-words, you cannot have a space such as #lordoftherings vs #lord #of #the #rings), which in turn makes the keyword into a type of search term, or what Twitter calls a “trend.” Trends are the little keywords on the left side of the normal Twitter interface or the “# Discovery” link on the upper section of Twitter. Hot trends are those that are used frequently in a small time span that Twitter updates all the time.
So how can you use a hashtag to help become discovered? The key is to find a hot keyword related to the topic you want to broadcast. In the world of gaming, most likely that will be the game you’re playing. For instance, as a World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 blogger, I often times will Tweet out a blog post by converting part of the title into a hashtag. More specifically, I’ll use #warcraft for my World of Warcraft posts and #diablo3 or #d3 for my Diablo 3 posts. If you look at those hashtags in the search mechanisms, you’ll see how Blizzard will often times use those to broadcast related content. So in a way those end up becoming the official hashtags for Blizzard and it’s something you’ll want to piggy back off of.
Another important aspect to hashtags is that people write applications to search for trending hashtags. There are applications that will mine hashtags and use that information somehow, possibly scooping up links, users, followers, etc. For instance, they might focus on certain hashtags like a #warcraft just to see recent posts. They call this process data mining. The application might then try to find prominent posters and have their automated accounts follow these users to continue to find information. It might seem a little creepy (it is in some ways) but this is part of the viral process that you may not see upfront. However, constant use of things like hashtags make it easier for these crawlers to find you and help broadcast you to others.
What you probably won’t want to do is put irrelevant hashtags into your tweets. Certainly, you can add a trending hashtag into your tweet. But if you look at those trending hashtags on the live feed, you’ll notice that the information quickly is lost as new tweets are ushered in at insane speeds. If you want a certain type of community to discover you, then using trending hashtags probably won’t garner you the attention you want (unless it’s for a game that’s hot or being released). The key in choosing your hashtag is finding that blend of a good topic/trend with decent traffic but not an overwhelming amount of tweets. That way people can discover you without being flooded.
One thing you want to avoid is having too many hashtags/trends in your tweet. Not everything is really worth hashtagging. The idea for using hashtags for promotion is to either piggyback off a decent trending topic and/or create a new trending topic. In short, you don’t want to over do it even though you can.
Note that you can put hashtags into Facebook posts as well. However, there are no APIs on the Facebook side that will allow Facebook applications to query posts. You can still use the hashtags to become part of the trend and be discovered on Facebook, but it isn’t quite as powerful as Twitter in this regard.
Another thing you want to avoid is spamming the same tweet over and over. Twitter has an algorithm that will throttle your tweet if you attempt to spam it within a certain time period. In the technical world, throttling essentially is when someone attempts a repeated action against a service/site within a short time frame then gets blacklisted. Fortunately, Twitter is somewhat forgiving in that they won’t IP ban you but your tweet may not be seen if you repeat it in rapid succession. If you do need to re-send the information or link, you will want to change the content around a little. You can still use the same trends and link, but you just have to avoid copy and pasting every minute (as an example).
I talked a bit about the idea for creating trends within Twitter. Trends are pretty much one of the ultimate tools in social media when it comes to sharing information. Trends usually occur because many people are talking about a single topic and are using that hashtagged keyword over and over. Trends also occur regionally and might be dialectically tied as well. For instance, you can see on the trends to the left how they’re for your region (it might be North America for instance). This is due to how people can enable geolocations on their mobile devices and computers. So you could even control a region’s trends with the right geographically located following.
Outside of people talking abut the trend/topic, tools like retweets and replies also can help boost the visibility of that trend. This can be a pretty rough challenge but I’ve seen people with 100k followers or so become trends on Twitter. Of course, this all depends on getting as many people to talk about that trend/topic as possible. But it really is a cascading process which is all numbers based. So if you have 20-30 followers but each of them average around 40-60 followers, you can probably get a percentage (say 4-5%) to help perform things like retweets and replies. If you combine that with a trending topic (like #warcraft) then you can multiple that visibility quite a bit. And that’s where the “going viral” aspect really takes off.
What about getting followers? That’s a really tough subject but one of the first things you will have to accept is that followers != (not equals) friends. Followers mostly are random accounts (can be people, bots, companies, etc.) that managed to discover you. I’m certain that there are services that you can pay for to help increase your followers or retweet your posts to help make it trending, but that’s a topic you’ll want to research on your own. One thing I do remember back in the day is the old #followfriday #ff trends. There’s a good blog post on getting Follow Friday to work. I recommend reading that.
Also, you’ll probably see that people will randomly follow you as you utilize hashtags and latch onto popular trends. Not everyone will be a real person and some could be bots waiting to spam you. That said, just like anything else, the important ingredient for your tweets is consistency. People go to your twitter because they’re expecting certain types of content put out on a regular basis. You don’t want to overflood people but at the same time you don’t want them to go away. I know some people can find posts highly offensive and unfollow as a result. Again as a gamer trying to improve their visibility and building their community, it all comes down to reflecting the type of image you are attempting to portray.
I think good tweets offer something informative and potentially interactive. You want to create questions or topics that allow people to interact with you. Lacking activity or having irrelevant, banal content just turns people off. So be mindful of what you put up and always keep the context in the forefront of what you’re doing.
One other thing about Twitter and Facebook is that you can have them talk to each other. I know Facebook allows you to connect your personal account to your Twitter account (also known as a Twitter Connection type of application, similar to Facebook Connect). I used to employ a Facebook application called Selective Tweets to handle posting from my Twitter account to my Facebook. However, it might be busted but at one time you could link the two (as well as Facebook Pages). So it might be worth checking out (if not that then some other Facebook application that does something similar). I prefer using something that updates all my information simultaneously so that I only have to post something once. That makes my life more efficient overall.
For mobile, you might look at TweetDeck since it’s able to integrate both Facebook and Twitter under one application. I’m not sure if you can post the same info to both accounts, but it was one of the sleeker integrated mobile applications for Facebook and Twitter around at one point.
What about other social media outlets? There is Google+ but despite Google claiming it managed to find its niche, I think for the average gamer, it really isn’t a good platform. Mostly, I’ll use Google+ to insure that my blog’s posts become part of the search engine (assuming that Google+ helps index content better). But I don’t think it’s the best way to share content at the moment as far as social networks go.
LinkedIn is a straight out no because it’s more for professionals. You could try but I don’t think it really helps letting my future employer know that I’m a game addict. StumbleUpon is another interesting tool that might be worth looking at. I occasionally will use StumbleUpon since it’s more randomized discovery tool than say Facebook or Twitter. But I feel that StumbleUpon works well if you have insanely good content with top notch graphics and something that really speaks for itself. You might want to use it for your Twitch channel but definitely you should spruce up your channel with a good layout, graphics and information to make it attractive for random eyes.
How about reddit or digg? Those two sites really aren’t great imo as a way to broadcast yourself. I think reddit is better for really hot trending topics that people want to discuss but not a way for people to get instant fame. To really make either of those work for you, you would have to, as a gamer and livestreamer, do something really special such as a world first event or other action that provides a reason to get voted up.
Of course, another mega popular social landing spot is Instagram. I feel that Instagram has a very bizarre place for gamers. Instagram really isn’t useful for most gamers since gamers want to focus on the games. But if there’s a very picturesque side of you, Instagram can provide a visual side of your life that broaden your scope of followers. But I honestly don’t find such a tool to be practical for most gamers.
There’s also raptr the social gaming network. In my view, raptr should be bigger for gamers but in the end it’s just another Facebook with more integration into certain games. Maybe in a few years it’ll be good as a niche mega-social network for gaming but the current feature set really isn’t that special to make me want to convert over. I do want to mention it to make people aware of its existence as it has potential to dominate the social network space for games.
But I would suggest trying to ask people on official forums for the actual games for advertising. I have seen more people go to Blizzard’s forums and announce their presence and thus far I haven’t really seen Blizzard do anything against it. It might be a good spot since you have highly targeted people. If you do go, make sure you tell people why they should check out your channel.
So what about Youtube, younow or other video sites beyond Twitch? I wrote up an article about these and what their purposes are in the scheme of things. Specifically for gamers, Youtube remains one of the better social networking tools for videos. However, where should it go in this list and how can you really employ it to your benefit? First, if you’re an established youtube creator, you probably can skip this part (unless you want to see what I have to say). Youtube to Twitch pretty much is what a blog is to twitter; it’s a one off type of tool for the creator but shows it’s power in the long tail compared to say Twitch, which focuses on the immediacy of an event (and if you’ve never heard of long tail, check out the article on Wikipedia for more information).
So what does that mean? I think when it comes to content you want to focus around specific topics that can have a good life and remain relevant over time. It’s the difference between watching say the Godfather and whatever Will Ferrell movie comes out. For gamers who want to enter into YouTube that might mean focusing on strategies (howto) type of content or the individual personality. How-to content are pretty much the real bread and butter for content as people constantly seek out ways to improve themselves. But the other aspect of good content creation will come from people with great personalities and presentation of material. Some of the worst videos on YouTube for gamers are the ones that just show a simple recording with irritating music. Without context and a good presentation, those videos end up polluting searches. A better video might involve a YouTube person injecting themselves and adding their voice and perspective/interpretation into the events of the video. Remember: we want content to have soul. If you just toss up a recording with no context, no one is going to give a care.
Even small things like good edits, clear speaking, timing, etc. are the small things that can differentiate you from other people. In the world of UI and product development, we call this process the “polish”. It’s what separates the Applie iPhone from a crappy, cheaper Samsung Galaxy. In short, it demonstrates to your audience that you care about what you do and put more effort than the guy next to you who might get a few hundred thousand hits from a cat sucking on a vacuum but never can match that ever again.
The thing is that you want your YouTube videos to compliment what you’re doing on your stream. The stream should be where all your live interaction occurs and YouTube where you can put more effort and the polish as well as seeing a better wholistic feedback loop come into play.
One thing to make sure in creating your YouTube videos is focus on SEO rules. SEO is such a critical thing in the world of content but it gets ignored by sloppiness or lack of knowledge. The scary thing is that SEO is, indeed, a black art but one that you must practice and play with to really have things come together. SEO is how you get discovered when you don’t use the social side. Having simple things like a very descriptive and concise title and description will boost your rankings. I find it insanely frustrating whenever I go to YouTube, type in “lfr throne of thunder part 1” or “lfr throne of thunder jin’rokh” only to find beta footage fights from normal modes. Even adding things to make your title more descriptive such as “LFR Throne of Thunder Jin’Rokh Patch 5.2 Strategy Guide” would boost you immensely because of the precision that someone searching for your video can get.
Lastly, what about Twitch itself? How can you really employ it to boost yourself? If you start to see the patterns in what I’m discussing, Twitch just becomes another part of the ideas within social media. While you can go out and get a webcam, decent internet connection and OBS, that really is just the barebones to getting started in taking your stream to the next level. You can’t get instant fame on day one because your face is on a camera and live on the internet; that’s just a given. Like anything else, Twitch has methods to rank you so as someone starting out, you have to climb up and become discovered. But how can that happen?
One of the first things you need to start working on is making sure whatever your content is relevant. I have a HUGE pet peeve whenever I see people who never bother changing the topic for their games; it’s essentially false advertising. Make sure you set your game topic every time you switch your games, even if it’s for an unpopular game. People go to a certain place for the content (the streamer might be part of the content but the game cannot be ignored).
Another massive pet peeve of mine is when I see horrible titles. A lot of people put up the most inane titles but they might wonder why they never get any viewers whatsoever, especially if they’re coming up the ranks. The titles are your bread and butter, especially if you’re unknown and haven’t built up a following yet. Outside of the game, the title should tell people what you’re doing and why they should watch your stream. It’s just like SEO; if people are looking around for content, they might just skip over you because there’s nothing relevant for them outside of sounding like a moron. The last thing you want to do while you’re struggling for growth is advertise to the world that you’re an idiot.
For titles, essentially put yourself in a potential viewer’s place. What my stake in taking time to hang out on that person’s channel? What benefits do I gain? What are they doing that makes their activity so special that I absolutely must join? It’s kinda like going to a job interview and the employer ask you, “So why should I hire you?” and you returning with the response, “Because I work hard.” The employer will chuck your resume out the window and just find the next non-generic humanoid to fill the spot. Obviously, you can’t do too much with the title but it should make a statement that is enticing enough to motivate people to check you out.
Also, don’t treat titles like a Tweet or Facebook post. While you can update your title like a status update, the concepts really aren’t the same. This is why shooting from the hip in the title is a poor approach but why some streamers probably end up doing this (out of bad habit from their Twitter/FB activities). I mean, you can change your strategy a bit as you really start to grow. But in the early stages, be very mindful of your audience.
Another thing to keep in mind is your page layout. Admittedly, if you’re not a designer nor HTML coder, then having an awesome page layout might be tough for you. However, having a killer basic layout and background is another element that really separates people. It’s just another polish element that tells people, “Hey I’m pretty serious about this.” If you really intend to make livestreaming into a semi-profession, you’ll have to invest a bit into your activities. For graphics, logos, etc., I recommend that fiverr.com site or if you want to push your budget slightly, give 99designs a go. 99designs probably is overkill but it’s a starting spot if you have some money and want something professional. If not just go to google and see what you can find.
Beyond your layout, you really need to work on describing your channel to viewers. Again I have a horrible pet peeve when it comes to visiting a Twitch channel with little to no information. You’re essentially telling me that you didn’t give a damn about anything and didn’t even bother filling out any information about yourself. So why should I ever want to go back? Part of the reason why I came is to find similar players like myself. It shouldn’t take too long to write out a simple biography. You shouldn’t even need any HTML knowledge to put some basic information about yourself down. Give me reasons to connect to you beyond the game.
Another thing is adding your social media links and possibly gaming information here. For World of Warcraft players, one of the things I enjoy checking out are players’ Armoury links. I want to see what you play and what you do. What if I want to team with you? Is it possible? Are you in the same region? Again, think of the participatory potential in this area. Also, make sure your links open a new window. Quite often, I’ll open a player’s Armoury link within the same window as their Twitch profile. That’s a sure way to lose potential viewers/followers. If you do add links, make sure you have the target=”_blank” inside of your link (that opens up a new window)
One last thing that you should not do under all circumstances is put an image of someone who is not you as the webcam image. If you do intend to use a webcam, show yourself. I see too many people putting up an image of a model in order to boost their viewership. Again, this is false advertisement. Worse yet, it’s a horrible turn off because you’re essentially lying to people to get cheap views. People will eventually never come back once they realize what you’re doing. Be sincere about whom you are especially if your goal is long term growth.
With those basics out of the way, you can focus on the content and methods of growing your channel. The thing you have to realize is that you don’t have to be the best player in the world to have a ton of followers. Once you figure out what your stream will be about, you need to cultivate it. Do things that involve a lot of participation. Ask questions from your stream, do polls and above all else get people to interact with you and each other. The more participation they have (i.e. the social functions), the more they will want to return because they’ll have a great reason to come back. For instance, one idea I have involves Beta games like Hearthstone. Since Hearthstone is closed beta, playing it on stream can make people intensely jealous. But imagine doing something with your stream where you can get your stream to vote on your next action (I’m not saying creating a special poll but just using something like 1 or have people type in the card). Then they feel as though they’re contributing to your game play and being able to participate in Hearthstone without actually having the game. It’s not as good as having the game, but it creates even more unique ways to get people involved.
I’m going to talk about three more topics. First are related topics on trolls and spammers. Many people detest both but they each have roles, especially as you’re starting up. I have this little saying when it comes to social media where the minute you start seeing trolls and spammers you can kinda say that you’ve made it. But why is that? The thing is that trolls and spammers inadvertently add views. It’s not the views that most people want but it’s part of the equation. I read an article once on how they broke down advertisement online. Essentially, the people clicking on advertisements were those that needed to “do something” all the time. So ads serve as mechanisms for the bored. Not sure if spammers and trolls are part of this group but I do think that they’re related.
But I do know as an empirical fact that the online world is really about about numbers and percentages for conversions. Depending on how well you optimize your site, content, etc., you can get low to very high conversions. What does that mean? Say you have 100k viewers per month coming to your site and you run advertisements for revenue. More than likely, you’ll see anywhere between 2-12% on average converting (meaning clicking) on those ads, depending on placement and the structure of your site. This is why just having sheer eyeballs (or impressions in the online advertisement world) is so important since a percentage will convert guaranteed.
When it comes to trolls and spammers, they are part of that equation. I mean, ideally no one wants either of them since they end up causing detriment to the community at large over time. But in the beginning their purpose really is to help boost your impressions/views until you’re getting the growth or view rate that you want. In that sense, you’ll have to ask yourself what you want to do with your content, site and stream.
For myself, I’m big on organic growth rather than artificially induced growth. I think the best stuff grows over time as a result of word of mouth rather than bribery (i.e. buying likes). Organic growth is more genuine and the people are more likely to stick around so long as you maintain a certain level of expectation (again the consistency element). Artificial growth such as using SEM, FAO, etc. help spike numbers initially but that aspect flattens out over time. That’s why the long tail effect is more desired since the distribution is more consistent over time.
Another thing in the equation of things goes back to the “soul” idea. But it’s more of an inverted business principle that comes from a VERY interesting article that I often cite from TechCrunch. The article is on venture capital and talks about the questions VCs ask their prospective business clients when they ask for capital. The most important question in the bunch is: What is your deadly sin? I cannot emphasize this aspect enough when it comes to product/business development. But it’s such a fundamentally sound idea and works similarly to the “soul” idea. In short, what the question ask is why should the customers return? What is it about your product that makes them unquestionably return?
As a livestreamer, this question might be tough but the idea still can apply, especially if your ultimate goal is to become partnered. In short, what will motivate people to increase your visibility in the world of livestreaming and gaming? What makes your content the ultimate go-to place? If your available and someone had a lousy computer with a terrible internet connection but had to choose between you and some other streamer, why would they choose your stream over the other? What do you have to offer?
If I go back to examples with businesses, I can add some context to this idea. Take Twitter and Facebook’s sin: vanity. Food buffets? Gluttony. World of Warcraft? Wrath, sometimes vanity. But when you think about it, it’s absolutely true and why people can’t help but to return to these businesses consistently.
One last thing. I talked about explosion of followers and growth, but tipping points are things that don’t really occur overnight. Growth takes long periods and a lot of work. Don’t be afraid of failure or meeting certain levels of expectation. Instead, focus on getting the basics right and sticking to the metaphor you want to develop for yourself. Over time, people will eventually see it and come to you and that’s where you really will see growth.
At any rate, I hope you enjoyed this blog and that you can find some of the advice here insightful and helpful.
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