How influencer marketing of Twitch works and why it works so well
How did this video game gameplay streaming platform become so popular in recent years that even live sport broadcasts and radio shows are starting to appear and how many viewers exactly are on Twitch? Twitch hosts around 15mil daily active users, with over two million unique broadcasters streaming content every month. While the platform’s focus has so far been on live-streaming users playing video games, they’ve also started to show interest into live sports broadcasts, radio shows and lifestyle streams. We’ve also heard of beauty bloggers beginning to live-stream their tutorials there! But why should marketers care? Why is Twitch becoming so big and how it can benefit your brand.
Twitch’s demographics skew mainly to men aged 18–34, a demographic that’s particularly resistant to advertisements and is hard to reach. The average Twitch user has stopped paying for cable TV and employs technology to block advertising across the internet. But hundreds of thousands of these hard to reach viewers tune in daily to watch top video game streamers, such as Ninja, Twitch’s biggest star, and most of the time they watch popular games such as current most popular game Fortnite, League of Legends and the new upcoming game that is currently exploding on Twitch Apex Legends.
The platform can be a useful alternative to the female-heavy Instagram for marketers looking to target men, but they need to be careful. With Twitch’s heavy focus on community building and strong personalities, marketers working with influencers need to do so in a very authentic and organic way — any signs of obvious pitches or badly-aligned brand work are likely to go down pretty negatively with viewers. Some other problems are explicit content that some of the female streamers do while streaming, which in the end does give them more views but it is not aligned with Twitch terms of use so most of them get banned for doing so. Brands need to be aware of that because word spreads quickly on Twitch and very quickly your brand can be connected with a streamer that people don’t like or that Twitch banned.
Influencer marketing allows the game industry to reach their target audience in a more authentic and valuable way than traditional advertising, which has taken a huge hit due to ad-blockers. Twitch is one of the most popular websites for gamers to watch influencers and gather news about the latest games and products. Being able to gather the analytics of your Twitch based Influencers is a huge advantage. As the social landscape continues to evolve, Twitch also provides influencers and marketers with another way to diversify their online presence and become less reliable on one source. Especially as we hear nearly half of users are tiring of seeing repetitive influencer posts on platforms like Instagram. It’s no secret that influencer’s organic reach continues to drop, and as platforms tweak their algorithms to prioritize certain content, it can make a huge difference to how influencer’s posts perform.
What’s more, for influencers who’ve seen dwindling ad revenues, Twitch also offers them another revenue stream through donations made by viewers watching live streams. CNBC recently explained that the company was trying to help influencers build and sustain their own businesses, one of the most popular streamers Ninja is reported to be earning $350k a month from the site. The platform can be amazing for someone who is passionate about video games, earning donations as well as being paid by certain sponsors. Brands need to be aware of this and start pushing their brand onto the Twitch scene because more and more men start to play video games as the video gaming culture is expanding so is Twitch and a demand for more streamers and content on it will just keep getting bigger.
Epic Games is a video game company that did this very well. As mentioned before one of the most popular if not the most popular streamer on Twitch Ninja is being sponsored by Epic Games to play their game Fortnite. By doing so Epic Games is one of the most popular and well know video game companies today with 20 mil people currently playing their game Fortnite. And more and more people are coming every day, by doing this Epic Games has made their print in the video game industry and has created impressive brand awareness in a relatively short period.
In the conclusion, do brands and marketers need to invest in to the Twitch, well the answer is absolutely yes. With video game vulture growing every day more and more people are starting to play and watch their favorite streamers. Soon sports broadcasting and radio will join and in the future who knows. The premise stays the same, brands need to be aware of this and start putting their efforts in Twitch influencer marketing.
