If you are a new twitch streamer, you are probably wondering how you can attract viewers. Maybe you want to stream games, maybe you want to stream yourself working or maybe you just want to show yourself on camera. But when seemingly everyone wants to record footage or live stream, who ends up watching the content? According to people who have gone through it, lacking an audience is one of the most demoralizing things you can experience online.
How to Get Your First Twitch Viewers?
Twitch attracts roughly 140 million unique monthly viewers, who spend hours watching the platform’s 2-million-plus creators that stream everything from Apex Legends and World of Warcraft to art and cooking shows and even live sports.
The number grows each year, thanks in part to how easy it has become to live stream, and platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube also increasingly encourage people to share and watch live stories.
Starting a career on platforms like Twitch often means spending some time broadcasting to absolutely no one. Most people starting out without built-in audiences from other platforms or supportive friends and family end up staring with zero viewership. And it can last anywhere from a few days, weeks, months, sometimes even years, depending on your luck.
Your initial 100 twitch viewers is an important step in building your channel.
Get Your Friends and Family
If you are expecting to make this into a living, you’re going to need more people introduced to twitch or else there can only be so many people that can make it. So why not to share your hobby to your nearest and dearest, friends and friends of your friends? This way you can easily attract another 25 viewers.
Social Media and Forums
Get on social media and tell people about your channel. Joining a streaming team or community will allow other gamers to host, raid and/or feature your channel.
There are countless communities directly in Twitch that you can join. Alternatively, you can search on Facebook for Twitch related groups.
These are great ways to advertise your channel in a friendly community environment. Make sure you follow the rules of the community, so you know you’re allowed to advertise in the right way. Some communities require you to introduce yourself before advertising your channel URL.
Many Twitch i use apps such as Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat to keep their fans up to date and connect with their fans on a more personal level. One of the biggest benefits of social media is that it can expose you to potential new followers who wouldn’t have discovered you otherwise.
Play Less Popular Games
Spend some time researching what are fun games to stream. Sometimes being the 10th streamer with 10 viewers in a smaller game is better than being the 1000th streamer with 2 viewers in a big game like WoW, PUBG or League of Legends. Why? Because a smaller game might allow you to receive more attention from the viewers. Being on the 1st page vs the 20th page is a huge difference.
Join Twitch Group Chat
Group Chat is a way to create invite-only chat rooms that live separately from the traditional Channel Chat.
Group Chat has the same moderation tools that broadcasters have on their own regular channels, and they can assign mods to invite people or allow anyone to invite whoever the heck they want. And if users start to get sick of people inviting them to double-secret chats, they can restrict who they get invites from.
Promote Yourself
Find your niche. How do you stand out among Twitch’s 2 million streamers? For Burke Black, all it took was a pirate hat and lots of patience. After two years of steady streaming, Black is now a partnered broadcaster with more than 23,000 followers that tune in to catch his late-night, swashbuckling-themed antics.
You’ll see him in full brown-and-beige pirate garb, complete with a skull-and-crossbones bandana and an epic beard to match. The 36-year-old is the farthest thing from imposing, though, as he giggles and cheers while enthusiastically chatting with his viewers.
Your followers want to know more about your channel than you can imagine, therefore give them all the juicy information using Twitch native info-panels:
- Go to your channel
- Click the button/switch that says “Edit Panels”
- Press that big + to add a panel
Now you can have a panel with text, images and URLs. It’s a good idea to probably have a panel for each of these things:
- Information about yourself including social media links
- Your Streaming schedule
- Donator button
- Your PC setup
- Your game configs
- Top donators
Networking Events
Connecting with followers and fans online can be effective, but not much beats meeting people in person. Numerous video games and Twitch events are held throughout the year in almost every major city around the world, and they can be great places to meet other creators, exchange tips, make new friends, and gain followers. Some of the best to attend are Twitch Con, PAX, MineCon, and Supanova. Numerous groups on Twitter and Facebook meet up in smaller towns and cities, too.
Who knows, but you might get another 20 viewers after one of those events.
Co-Streaming
Co-streaming is a great way to connect with your community around the things you love besides what you normally stream. With a co-stream, you can put your unique spin on a broadcast other than your own to create a novel experience for everyone.
This feature is enabled for many special events and Twitch-licensed content throughout the year, including things like marathons, award shows, and conventions.
Watch Your Own Stream
You can use mobile devices to watch your own stream. Remember for every viewer you have you appear higher up the Twitch category page, the higher you are the more viewers you get. Just make sure that you have enough bandwidth and don’t negatively affect your streams performance.
Real also: Does Twitch Count Yourself as a Viewer
Mutual Subscription & Views
Network by joining other people’s channels and becoming their friends. Making friends on Twitch can be easy and it will help you grow your audience a lot, especially with the “host” + “raid” features. They will allow streamer viewers to be “moved” into the channel of another stream seamlessly.
That is a great way for you to start auto-hosting people you’ve met and that you enjoy, hoping that they will reciprocate the act of hosting you when they go offline and you’re online!
Usually, as you wind up your broadcast before you go do something else, you can decide to be altruistic and help another streamer with a little few extra viewers. Other creators will highly appreciate you and will, possibly, in the future — raid you back.
Use Bots
You can pay for bots to populate your stream, thereby pushing you higher in the Twitch directory. Every time you enable the bot to increase your viewer count the appropriate amount of fake chatters join your chat to make the channel look natural.
Stream Regularly
Consistency is crucial — just as people tune in to their favorite TV shows at the same time every night, they should know exactly when you’ll be live on Twitch. Whether you broadcast in the afternoon or in the morning, stick to your schedule, and make sure it’s prominently displayed across both your Twitch page and social media sites.
Some time-slots are more accessible than others: Maybe you can only stream during your evenings, maybe only in the morning. You should try different streaming “slots” throughout the day to see what is more comfortable for you and what yields more average viewers.
Be yourself!
What sets Twitch streams apart from other forms of entertainment is that the audience is almost always a key part of the experience. All Twitch broadcasts are accompanied by a chat room, which allows creators to interact directly with the people who support them. The more you make your viewers feel like they’re sitting on the couch with you while you play, the better chance you have at building a loyal audience.
Follow these simple rules:
- Your chat should be ahead of anything else
- Get a microphone and set it up so you can communicate clearly
- Get a face-camera, put some effort in looking decent and don’t be shy
Having the right hardware/software to communicate with your audience is critical to the growth of your channel. Not having the ability to read the comments and reply to them with your voice is a streamer-sin! Most streamers use a face-cam while they broadcast.
Your audience wants to hear your opinions and love to be able to interact while looking at you as you are the entertainment. Creating a strong relationship with your audience through clear communication is the key to maintain a healthy Twitch audience.
Acknowledging their participation in the chat, their follows and/or donations will allow you to provide your viewers with an active way to interact with you.
Summary
After months of having no viewers on twitch, finally getting a couple of viewers to watch you can be nerve-wracking as well as exciting.
