A Growth Hacker’s Guide to Growing Your Twitch Channel In 2022 UPDATED (Part 1/6): What Kind of Streamer Are you? 🤔
Want to read the different parts of this series at your own pace? Fast track to:
☝Disclaimer
Everything written here is based on my own personal preference and style. To say that there is one way to grow your Twitch channel would be incorrect. My background is in digital marketing and growth hacking. I’m not a full-time Twitch streamer. I’ve spent thousands of hours watching different streamers of all shapes and sizes critically for a while now and I’ve also noticed things that have clearly worked particularly well for me and my own channel growth thus far.
More and more small streamers have also been asking me for advice on how to gain more views and get more traffic to their streams so I wanted to share some of my growth tactics with you.
If you’re a new streamer, you should read Twitch’s Terms of Service before getting in too deep. It’s important to know details of the platform so you have a clear idea of what’s allowed and what’s not.
Now that that’s out of the way, I’ve broken down the series into six parts listed below. I’ve organized them in a specific order to emphasize what things new streamers should prioritize before they implement channel growth tactics.
📈 6 Pillars of Twitch Channel Growth:
🤔Identifying Yourself As a Streamer
What kind of streamer do you want to be? Make sure you’re clear about that. This is crucial in determining the course of your growth strategy.
💞Community Interaction
This refers to how you support your fellow streamers, how you interact with your audience, and how you use social media. Community interaction is key!
⚙️Equipment, Software, Tools & Settings
What equipment you’re using to broadcast your streams, which software and tools you’re using, and how you’ve configured all your settings across the board.
✨Twitch Channel Presentation
This refers to how good your channel and stream looks/feels and how attractive it can be for viewers once they come in. Channel hygiene can make a lasting impression with viewers and separate you from everyone else.
🗣Channel Interaction
Refers to how you’re treating/interacting with viewers in chat and what more you’re doing to make it worthwhile for them to stick around.
📈Twitch Channel Growth
Refers to what you’re doing to grow your channel (views, follows, subs, etc), how you’re doing it, and what you’re doing to make it worthwhile for people to commit to your channel.
🤔 Before we move on… what kind of a streamer are you? (UPDATED 16/07/2020)
Generally, most streamers fall into the following groups: Variety, Single Game, Creative, Fitness, Cooking, Speedrunners (my fav group to watch), Professional/Competitive Gamers, Drama/IRL, and Good People Streamers. You can also, of course, be a mix. I’m also probably missing some groups.
It’s also worth mentioning that since this article was written in 2018, there have been new categories of streamers opening up almost all the time. Some of the most successful streamers on Twitch right now are pioneering their own categories with new creative ways to perform, entertain, and engage with their audiences.
💯 ProTip: Try not to limit yourself to one category of streaming. Think about how you can be DIFFERENT AND UNIQUE in a vast ocean of streamers doing the same thing.
Twitch also recently added Tags which help identify stream type. There are literally HUNDREDS of stream tags now and Twitch is constantly adding more. This has really widened the pool of streamer types overall, so it might be outdated to classify streamers within the nine buckets I have above.
Regardless, it’s REALLY important to know what kind of streamer you want to be. Once you know, spend a lot of time critically looking at streamers similar to you. Ask yourself what you like about them, and how you’re different from them. The streamers that rise to the top are often ones with something very unique to them. ALWAYS ask yourself what you can do to be different, how you can raise the bar, and increase the quality of your streams; inspiration is everywhere and there is no shortage of new ideas!
Commit to this by writing down what kind of streamer you want to be and what makes you different in the comment section below (link to your channel too). I’ll get down to brass tacks in the next installment, which will cover the first thing you should be thinking about as a new streamer: community interaction!
P.S., enjoying this series so far? Check out my other article on how to take your Twitch stream on the road where I talk about how I kept up my streaming schedule all across Japan for two months!
P.P.S., this series has blown up a lot more than I ever could have imagined! It seems to be helping a lot of new Twitch streamers and many people are writing to me asking how they can support me. Here are a few things to consider: you can tip me anywhere from $1-$5 through PayPal directly here, or you could share this article with anyone else looking to get into streaming, or you could follow me on Twitch and come say hi next time I’m 🔴LIVE! Thanks everyone, and happy streaming!
