Elevate Your Stream: 5 Steps to Create Meaningful Interactivity

The creator landscape has completely transformed in 2020, creating exciting opportunities for new content offerings and direct-to-fan business models.

Wondering how to create a successful DTC content & engagement strategy in this new normal?

We’ve created this guide to share with you some of the game-changing best practices we’ve learned by partnering with the world’s biggest artists and leading entertainment and gaming companies — adapted for use by content creators of all shapes and sizes.

Step 1: Design for the Superfan ⚡

Put yourself in the shoes of your best audience: the ones that will show up for you in any new endeavor.

When you create experiences geared toward your Superfans — performing a cult-favorite throwback track, talking through the inception of your famous, pizza recipe, reliving the camaraderie of the 2011 Playoffs — you create organic moments for communal experience.

Consider the case of Melissa Etheridge, who built a music live stream subscription channel, designed for her most loyal fans. By performing a regular cadence of intimate shows from her garage, complete with Cover Song Tuesdays and podcast-like discussions, she quickly created a 21st century interactive fan club — one that’s generating over $50k/mo in revenue.

By starting with the best experience for your core audience, you’ll develop evangelists who’ll grow your business. 🚀 And if you’re just starting out, listen to your first viewers and convert them into your premiere fan club!

For more pro tips on building a successful Superfan service, check out Variety’s coverage of our friend Melissa Etheridge.

Step 2: Plan for Success — and for Scale 📈

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Netflix marathons never qualified anyone for Boston. Steph Curry didn’t lob a basketball from the half-court line one day and say “Hey I should do this professionally!” Ok, you get our drift here.

As with all things in life, creating a successful content strategy requires planning. Starting off with these two ✌️ simple things in mind will give you a major advantage over the long haul:

1. Start with the Right Ingredients: equipment, design assets, and personnel are essential for success. Utilize PSD templates and recommended specs when creating new assets. We recommend a production team of two on big live streaming days — one content producer, and one experience producer focused on interactivity and end-viewers.
2. Stick to a Cadence: how many followers did you start with on Twitter? How about friend on Facebook? Developing a powerful direct-to-viewer channel requires consistent content releases, but it’s the right business move .

Step 3: Be Intentional with Interactivity 🔊

Engaging, interactive moments will leave your audience hungry. Here are a few tips to stimulate conversation and keep your viewers coming back for more:

1. Create Lower Thirds Before The Show: image-based lower thirds have creative freedom: they drive interaction with exciting graphics, or even light animation through GIFs. Utilize your run of show to design Lower Thirds for key moments: introducing new speakers, shouting out a Sponsor, highlighting a new track, etc.
2. Highlight User-Generated Content: showcasing UGC is a great way to drive engagement, as other viewers will want to be featured once they see features in the stream. Consider using an Event-Specific #Hashtag to pull in audience-generated Tweets.
3. Respond to the Moment: another powerful engagement strategy is to amplify authentic moments. Respond to crowd sentiment in real time using text-based Message Overlays. You’d be surprised how well the audience responds to a simple message at the right time, like “Make Some Noise in the Chat! 🔥”.
4. Don’t Forget about Chat: creative use of chat can go a long ways. Consider using Moderator-specific icons to highlight special guests (speakers, former team members, etc.) who may participate. With Pandora Live, Chat was utilized to integrate a Wendy’s sponsorship (we’ve never seen so many 🍔 thrown in chat before).

Step 4: Build Community with Gamification 💡

Community starts by having your best fans come back regularly. We talked a little about designing experiences for your superfans; now how can we create additional mechanisms for audience loyalty?

Gamification refers to adding game-like elements to your experience — common examples include rewards systems such as points or sweepstakes. Here are a few tips for successful execution:

1. Create a Play Along Experience: with recurring streams, consider ways to keep the audience engaged — such as fan predictions or trivia tied to the stream outcome.
2. Utilize a Points System: reward viewers with points based on engagement such as their time spent, social shares, and correct predictions.
3. Feature Power Users with a Leaderboard: a little friendly competition goes a long ways! Creating a Leaderboard 🏆 that showcases your power users will keep them invested in the experience week over week.
4. Reward Winners: take it to the next level by rewarding winners with an on-screen shoutout, or something more involved like a Sponsored Sweepstakes item!

Step 5: Listen to Your Audience (they’ll love you for it) 👂

One of the key tenets of interactivity is truly understanding your viewers. Listen to your viewers, and think about ways to help feed their desires — and in turn grow your own audience and business.

1. Let Viewers Drive the Action with Polls: in truly live events, one easy way to incorporate viewer preference is Polling. In her first “Quarantine Concert”, Erykah Badu created intimate audience participation by taking song requests through Poll Overlays.
2. Look For Themes in Chat: engaged audience members will let you know what’s on their mind. Look for trends in chat to see what’s working and what’s missing, and look for ways to integrate the feedback.
3. Track Event Analytics & Optimize: defining your content strategy is an ongoing process. With Maestro, you have the ability to drill your dashboard down around an event, and truly see the key moments in the show. If you have a run of show handy, check it against your timeline — what were the peaks and valleys for viewership? How about engagement?

By understanding what’s working you can continue to optimize to create an impactful content, engagement, and monetization strategy that grows with you over the long term.

To learn more about how Maestro can empower your content business, check out our website.

Originally published at https://blog.maestro.io.