How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Stream, Personal Brand, and Sponsorship Opportunities.
Social media is one of the most important tools a streamer has to growth their stream and network with others.
Yet a surprising number of people don’t use it at all, or just don’t know how to use it correctly. I’ve seen so many streamers only use their social media accounts to post when they go live, and they never interact with followers.
Big mistake.
You see, the functions of social media are almost limitless for streamers. One of the most important functions of social media is to nurture your personal brand.
If you aren’t familiar,
“Personal branding is essentially the ongoing process of establishing a prescribed image or impression in the mind of others about an individual, group, or organization.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_branding
On top of branding and stream growth, you can also use social media to land more sponsorships. (Of course I have to mention the uses for sponsorships! You are reading the PowerSpike blog after all.)
So in this post, I want to do a deep dive on social media and fill your heads with the most important information that I know, so that you can go out and start using the platforms to your advantage.
First, let’s look at some of the most prevalent social platforms for streamers today:
Twitter.
Twitter is one of the most important social media sites for streamers to grow their personal brand, as well as grow their stream.
Twitter is good for:
- Driving new viewers to your stream through retweets.
- Sharing small tidbits of information that develop your personal brand (Think of short thoughts of information that you like to share).
- Developing relationships with sponsors and getting recognized.
- Interacting with your viewers and nurturing long-time fans.
Let’s start off talking about how Twitter can grow your stream.
There are a number of things you can do on Twitter to increase your stream traffic. These include:
1. Posting a “Going Live” tweet. Make the use of gifs, videos, and highlights in your ‘going live’ tweets to draw in viewers.
2. Use hashtags. There are a ton of hashtags that you can use that relate to the game you’re playing or the theme of your stream. I don’t recommend using hashtags that will encourage bots to retweet your things (those bots are driving ZERO traffic to your stream; it’s a waste of time).
3. Conduct giveaways. Encourage viewers to retweet your tweets in order to enter into a cool giveaway you’re hosting.
4. Tag the developers of the game you’re playing. There’s a chance that they might toss a retweet to you if you commonly support their game and are active on their Twitter page or in different communities (it’s not likely you can just tag a developer and they’ll retweet if you’re a total stranger).
5. Tell your views to tweet at you when you go on breaks.
6. Do a Q&A on your Twitter account.
7. Follow relevant personalities and interact with them on a daily basis.
Like I said before, Twitter is perfect for interacting with fans and nurturing relationships with them.
In fact, I recommend that you make a Twitter list of viewers that you know who have followed you, and taking some time every day to go through the list to respond to the tweets that they post.
Not only does this strengthen your personal brand, but it connects you on a much deeper and personal level with viewers (and they’ll appreciate that).
And don’t worry, we’ll talk more in depth about sponsorships and branding here in a minute.
Facebook.
Ah, Facebook.
It’s the classic social media platform. At its roots, it’s meant to connect you with family members and friends.
But after exploring a bit, Facebook can be a great tool for interacting with viewers and growing your brand.
Before I get into Facebook tips, there are some things that I don’t recommend you do on Facebook:
- First off, don’t add viewers onto your personal Facebook account. Create a page or group for your stream and interact there.
2. Secondly, don’t let Facebook fool you with their “Boosted Posts” feature. Just know that it doesn’t work for streamers, and will most likely lose you money if you decide to use it.
With that being said, here are some things that Facebook is great for:
1. Long-form posts. While Twitter is great for sharing little tid-bits of info where you can show personality, Facebook does not have a character limit for their posts. This means that you can go deep when posting to Facebook.
I recommend using Facebook as a blogging platform. Seriously. If you enjoy talking about something and want to create long-form content about it, there’s no better place to write it. All the sharing, commenting, and interaction functionalities are there.
2. Hosting contests. If you want to interact with your viewers and schedule something fun within the community, there is no better place than a Facebook group to host a contest.
The ideas for contests are endless. Do you play Rocket League and want to challenge viewers to see who can get to a certain rank first with a blank account? Tell them to upload their clips to your Facebook group and have everyone participate in the content.
Form this idea to whatever you want, and it will surely give a great community experience to anyone who participates.
3. Host events for your stream. As Carol Arthur says,
“Facebook allows you to invite people to an event, post reminders and carry on discussions with delegates. You can see who is going to attend your event and those who are maybes. With so many young professionals using the social network, Facebook can be an excellent way of promoting an event to would-be delegates.” — http://www.northernlightspr.com/five-good-reasons-why-facebook-is-good-for-business/
Before sever this section off, it’s only right to give a bit of justice to other platforms that are worth checking out (and I’ll make this quick):
- Reddit. Reddit isn’t very good for sharing thoughts and interacting with viewers, but it’s a great way to build personal brand. I highly recommend that you become an active part in the /r/Twitch community. Write posts about what interest you about streaming, help others, etc. You’ll start to build a name for yourself.
- Instagram. This social platform is perfect for connecting on a personal level with viewers. On other social media sites you might be focused on keeping your content stream related. But Instagram is great for sharing moments away from the stream. Going on a long train ride? Take pictures of different scenery. Going to a convention? Snap up. Just take pictures that interest you. You can then provide a ton of text to go along with the picture (there’s a huge text limit, so go wild).
Alright, enough about different social platforms. Let’s get into some of the ways you can leverage these sites for reasons other than stream growth.
Growing your personal brand.
Social media is quite possibly the best way to nurture your personal brand.
Personal branding is all about the way you convey your personality, and the voice to which you attribute to yourself and the one that you’d like everyone to hear.
The most important aspect that you need to keep in mind when developing your brand is your voice.
Ask yourself:
Who are you? What do you stand for? What is your personality like? What do YOU like? What are you good at? What do you have a lot of knowledge in? These are all things that social media can help you convey.
Your main goal on social media is to portray your voice in a consistent manner.
Let me give you an example:
Let’s say you’re an introverted fellow. You have a ton of knowledge on OBS, and you love to help people over social to get their streams looking nice and shiny.
One of your main hobbies is to learn about philosophy. You commonly tweet deep thoughts that you have or interesting tidbits of information that cause your viewers to think. Everyone who follows you loves these interesting bits, and you get a lot of responses.
Now, how much sense would it make to wake up the next day and create a post in all caps that reads:
“WOW! CRAZY H1Z1 GAMEPLAY 22 KILLS MADNESS!!!! HOLY S**T I CAN’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED AT MINUTE 22. CHECK IT OUT AND SUBSCRIBE!!1”
Most, if not all of your followers would be taken back by this. Why?
Because it’s not your voice.
Social media is all about consistently portraying who you are and what you like. And all the platforms that are available to you give you the ability to portray who you are flawlessly to your audience.
So before you start posting on social, make sure you have a plan of action for portraying your real, passionate self to the world.
That’s personal branding.
Ok, time for a complete 180.
Earlier, I mentioned that I was going to talk about how you can use social media to look for and increase the chances of you getting sponsored by a brand.
I KEEP MY PROMISES. (sorry, I get worked up)
You may not recognize this, but the truth is that social media is the perfect tool for scouting and developing relationships with key decision makers in a company.
What is a decision maker, you ask?
Well, they’re the person that has the say so at whether you get sponsored by the company you’re going after. That’s why it’s important to get on this person’s radar as soon as possible, and social media gives you that power.
But before you start interacting, you have the find where this person is.
Finding a Decision Maker
There are a ton of tools that you can use to scout a company’s decision maker, my favorite being LinkedIn.
On LinkedIn, you can search a company and then click a button to see every single one of their current employees. Pretty nifty, eh?
All you have to do once you’re on a company’s LinkedIn page is search for terms that signify that a person is a decision maker. For instance, someone at a company who has control over sponsorships would have the title, “Marketing Manager”, “Talent Seeker/Manager”, “Sponsorships Manager”, or something similar. Take time to try different things.
Once you enter the search terms, a list of people will appear that have titles like that search term. It’s here that you’ll find a decision maker.
(p.s. if you’ve found a decision maker but their profile is blocked, you’ll need to expand your connections to see them. Take some time to send connections to other people at the company explaining who you are and why you want to connect.)
After you’ve found your person, give them a quick search on Google to find their other social media accounts, or just try and connect with them through LinkedIn. Just be sure you’re being straightforward in your connect message, don’t try and deceive anyone.
Now that you’ve found their social media accounts, the next step is simple:
Interact with them and get on their radar. What does this mean?
It means that you provide valuable interactions with the things that they post about or that they are interested in.
For instance, did the person just share an article they wrote on Twitter? Read the full thing (yes, actually read it) and give a nice comment about what you liked about it.
Did they just write their first book? Buy the book and take a picture with it telling the person how much you enjoy it and their other writing.
You get the idea.
These things will help you get on the radar of a decision maker at a company and help you establish a relationship.
One you feel that you’ve connected with an individual enough to reach out, find their email either on their social profile pages or just by asking them.
Now, you’re ready to send a proposal. We actually wrote a detailed guide on how to send an awesome proposal, and I think it’ll come of use to you here.
Look at that. You made it through this maze of an article.
I hope that by the end of this, you’ve gained something that you can take home and use to your advantage. Whether that be how to use social to grow your brand, or just make more money for your stream.
The power of social media is crazy, and a lot of people don’t use it correctly. If you can be the one who does, you’re 45 steps ahead of the game.
As always, I know this stuff is confusing, so don’t hesitate to reach out to me @PowerSpike_ on Twitter or on our Facebook page. I’m here to help you with any streaming problem you run into, so hit me up on the DMs.
Also, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Like our Facebook page. We post a ton of cool content relating to Twitch sponsorships, and you’ll feel at home there.
Thanks for reading!
