COMMUNITY UPDATE
This Month in The Real World
Our first week on Twitter, a community rebrand and some new toys for our community members to play with, we’re here to recap the last month in The Real World!
Running a cross-platform streaming community has presented a number of challenges to us. We’ve always prided ourselves on supporting all streamers that are a part of our community regardless of the size of their channel, the platform they stream on or their level of experience as a streamer.
What started out as a community built around a single channel has evolved over the last 6 months to become a community of streamers that help to support and promote each other in a way we could never have imagined.
It’s truly heartwarming to see our community members going out of their way for each other, building and growing their own communities and sharing what they learn from us with others.
Given the evolution of our own community, we decided it was time to branch out and see how else we can help to support and promote our community members, and this past week has been our first step in offering these new opportunities to our community.
The Real World on Twitter
Our first step was a pretty obvious one, to expand out community into the world of Social media.
Last Sunday we launched our new Twitter account, @TRWStreaming. This account is managed by us, but is designed purely for growing and promoting both our community and it’s members.
It’s been less than 7 days, but already we’ve seen some fantastic interaction with our new Twitter account and we’ve been able to set up some great integrations between our Discord server and our Twitter account to let us better promote our community streamers.
Community Shout Outs
Like most Discord Servers, we use a shoutout bot (NowLive Bot to be exact) to shout out streamers in our community when they go live. This has become fairly standard practice in most Discord servers we visit but, being us, we wanted to do things a little differently.
We have a mix of Mixer, Twitch and YouTube content creators within our community and we always make every effort to afford all of them the same opportunities when it comes to promotion and shout outs.
Using both NowLive Bot and NotLive Bot allows us to shout out both our streamers and YouTube content creators separately within our Discord.
By utilising the Zapier service, we were able to watch our shout out channels for new messages and modify them into a format suitable for Twitter, before posting them directly to our Twitter account.
So now, any time one of our announcement bots (both NowLive and NotLive) posts a new message into our Discord, our Zapier integration will grab those messages and post them as Tweets for us, allowing us to promote our streamers directly both in our Discord server and through our Twitter account simultaneously.
Auto-Retweets
On top of our Shout Out system, we wanted to give people a way to promote other streamers they recommend (or themselves when they aren’t live) easily through our community Twitter account.
By using the amazing IFTTT services, we were able to set up a community hashtag (#RealWorldStreaming) and monitor Twitter for tweets using that hashtag. If we find new ones, we automatically retweet them from our account!
What these new integrations allow us to do is to focus on building and growing our community while continuing to be able to offer our community members new opportunities for promotion and networking without stretching ourselves too thin.
Under The Hood
We’ve been making some changes to our Discord Server this week to. In between tidying some things up and preparing for an announcement next week (we’ll post more about that as it gets nearer to the time), we’ve been making some upgrades to the information that gets posted to our Discord.
Combined Shout Outs
Previously, we had two separate channels in our Discord server for shouting out streamers. One for what we previously called Promoted Streams, who were streamers that had helped us initially build up the community, and one for all of our community streamers.
In an effort to promote equality within our community as much as possible, we’ve combined both of these channels into one now-live channel, which will announce all of our streamers in one place, regardless of channel size, time in our community or anything else.
We want all of our streamers to feel immediately at home and equal among our community, and this was the best step forward we could take in order to try and accomplish that.
Game News
We also made some internal updates to our game channels in our Discord server this week. Again, using the amazing IFTTT, we’ve linked up the Twitter accounts from specific game developers to display their Tweets directly in our Discord channels for the relevant games.
The feature is currently in Beta and already we have a few tweaks scheduled over the next week to stop tracking replies to other Tweets and only pull through direct timeline tweets, but so far we’ve seen positive results and the ability to display a lot more game-related information directly in our Discord server.
Coming Up
Over the next week we will be continuing to work on our Twitter integration and making any necessary tweaks and adjustments to our shout outs as well as refining our Games channels integrations to pull in more relevant information.
We’re gearing up towards an announcement next week that we hope will provide more opportunities for our streamers moving forwards, but until then we’re keeping this one a little bit closer to our chests.
That’s it for this week’s wrap-up, expect to see more of these posted each week on either a Saturday or Sunday from us as we attempt to reach out and keep our community more informed of the steps we’re taking to try and help and support them the best we can.
From us at The Real World, we want to take this opportunity to thank all of our community members from the bottom of our hearts. We hope we can continue to provide you with more support and opportunities as we move forward together.
Until next time, #HappyStreaming
