Twitch Growth Strategies — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] What's up streamers, it's Ashnee. I'm all about helping you pursue your dreams and learn to stream. And I want to give you my best advice for growth with respect to the current Twitch meta. And just so you know that you can trust me, I am a Twitch partner averaging currently between 150 to 200 average viewers.

[00:19] I started on Twitch in 2013, streamed to 25 people for 4 years, stopped, started making YouTube videos, came back to Twitch May 23rd, 2018 and got partnered in two months. We hit 1,000 plus

[00:35] subscribers in four months. I also have a sold out coaching business and I spent three years of my life studying as much as I could about branding, audience growth, community management,

[00:49] marketing, all of those buzzwords. So the first thing we're going to talk about is your schedule. You've heard from myself and all the other streaming advice people here on YouTube that consistency is really important.

[01:02] And we're not lying to you. It definitely is. However, consistency can mean a lot of things. It can mean consistency in your schedule, but also consistency of the atmosphere, consistency in the types of games that you're streaming.

[01:17] And when people know what to expect from you, they can be a little more likely to show up if it's something that they enjoy. Now, this doesn't mean fall into the trap of just do the same thing over and over again.

[01:29] It's still really important that you change things up consistently and keep things as fresh as you can. When it comes to the actual schedule of what times you're going to be live on Twitch and what days,

[01:42] I think the first thing that you should prioritize is what is going to fit into your life. So not everyone has the stamina and even the reason to need to stream six or seven days a week.

[01:55] If you're streaming to zero people, there's no reason for you to stream to zero people seven days a week. And likewise, if you don't have that level of stamina, it could actually be working against you. Something that we've been told for a long time is that growth only happens while you're live.

[02:11] But that's not necessarily true with the current Twitch meta. A lot of streamers are seeing growth because they've expanded out to other platforms. So myself and other stream advice people, for example, we're seeing a lot of growth on YouTube

[02:25] and we're taking that growth from YouTube and bringing it back onto Twitch. So in order to see growth, it's not necessarily just be live. It's more a factor of how much content are you creating and how many opportunities are you giving people to see you and your face and your message.

[02:42] if I'm not live all the time or if I'm not live at the current time that a person is able to tune in there's a YouTube video there's a podcast and there's a ton of social media that they can get involved with as well if the stream isn't currently live so don't prioritize over scheduling yourself

[03:00] and feeling like you have to be live to see growth because you just don't you want to prioritize yourself in your life because if your schedule is just too much when it comes to streaming It's not going to be something that you maintain anyways.

[03:14] And we all know that seeing success, the way that successful people work, is that they are able to do small things every day that lead up to a big change over an amount of time, like a year or two years.

[03:27] That's how you're going to see success on Twitch, is creating a schedule that you can consistently stick to. A lot of people, like I said in the past, thought that this had to be six or seven days a week, But what we're seeing right now and what's been working for people that I've worked with in my stream coaching business has actually been going down to three days a week, which doesn't seem like a lot, but they're also prioritizing other platforms.

[03:50] So they're making content on YouTube. Maybe they've got a podcast and they have downtime as well. So they don't feel like they're constantly hustling and having to be live in order to grow. Now, if you're going with this three days a week, that's also not to say that streaming six or seven days a week is always the wrong choice,

[04:09] because for some people it is the right choice. But if you're starting with three days a week, something that is really important to consider is your start time. If you start at 7 a.m. on Tuesday and then 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday is a midday stream,

[04:24] it becomes really difficult for people to memorize your schedule. And I have a quote that I want you to remember here. It's easy to do means more likely to do. If you make your schedule easier to memorize for people, it's more likely that they're going to show up and it's going to fit into their day.

[04:41] So just because you get off work an hour early on Fridays doesn't necessarily mean that you should stream an hour earlier. Maybe that could be an hour that you dedicate to checking through all your YouTube comments or getting more involved in social media.

[04:56] The second thing we need to talk about is your mission. This is your why, this is your purpose, and this becomes increasingly more important as more and more people come onto the platform and as you try to go more and more towards

[05:11] the full-time content creator lifestyle. If you just starting out on the platform this isn super important In the very beginning what you need to focus on is just having fun and figuring out if Twitch is for you or not because it might not be and there no reason for you to put in a

[05:28] ton of time and effort and analysis paralysis into this if it's not something that you genuinely do enjoy and want to put the massive amount of effort into this when it takes to see growth.

[05:40] But if you have decided that you're a person that is going to enjoy this and this is your thing, then absolutely, having a deeper reason behind your content is very important because you're going to have times where you feel like you can't overcome a thing,

[05:55] that the world is working against you. Maybe you're getting haters and there's a lot of negativity around you. There's a lot of things that could happen and you need something that's deeper to pull you through those times of negativity.

[06:07] Now this can be a lot of things. This might be you just genuinely love people. This might be you just genuinely love video games. This might also be you want to start a business or you want to learn how to become an influencer.

[06:20] This might be that you want to make a little bit of money, which I know that is something that can be a very divisive conversation. But there's no reason, I think, for us to be afraid of that conversation or afraid of the reality that some people do want to make money from this platform.

[06:38] And it's okay, especially if you're expecting yourself to invest 80 hours of work time a week into growing as a streamer, to make the realization that you might need to get comfortable making money and figuring out ways to do that.

[06:51] So I've covered that in a separate video, though. I'll link it up at the top for you. Another thing you can focus on is incentivizing people to show up early. Now, this has nothing to do with content value.

[07:03] We'll actually get into that here in a little bit. incentivizing people to show up early is a good idea because we know if we have a healthy beginning of our stream it's more likely that we're going to have a healthier middle and a healthier end

[07:16] of our stream there's a few different ways that you can incentivize people so the first way is having a shorter starting soon screen which I know is difficult this is definitely one of my biggest weaknesses the way that you do this is that you want to have as much prepared ahead of time before

[07:32] you hit that start streaming button as possible. You want all of the social media to be taken care of as possible. You want everything ready to go. Because think about it from the viewer's

[07:44] perspective. If someone comes into your stream, whether that's for the first time or the thousandth time, and they see that starting soon screen, they're really excited. They might stick around for a while, but even the most excited person is going to get less excited if they just hear

[08:00] you're starting soon music and C, you're starting soon graphic or video and you never come on the screen. Another way you can incentivize people to show up early is by running a giveaway in the very beginning of your stream. Now I know that giveaways can be a divisive subject as well,

[08:17] but hear me out for a second. So something that I did and something that contributed a lot to very fast growth was incentivizing people to show up early by giving away one-on-one coaching sessions. People were only able to enter into the giveaway the first five minutes that my face came

[08:34] on the camera during the live stream and then we did the giveaway the last stream of the week about halfway through the stream and they had to be present to win. So what you're doing there is first incentivizing people to show up early but also encouraging them to stay and incentivizing

[08:50] them to show up on time to every single stream that you have which can be we know very helpful. Now, giveaways are a whole separate topic we can make a video over. Let me know if you want one of those as well, because I know there are ways to do giveaways well,

[09:06] and there are some ways to do giveaways very poorly. Another thing that you can do to help your growth on Twitch is increasing your just chatting time. Now, most of us are gamers, and we know that that is really the niche that Twitch serves in the very beginning,

[09:22] but as with any business, and also you as a streamer, starting with the niche is very, very helpful for helping you resonate with a specific audience. But if you want to continually see growth with your business, your content, your brand,

[09:36] something that you have to do eventually is learn how to expand and become a little bit more general and welcome in new audiences, which is exactly what Twitch did when they started with IRL and they created the creative category. They brought a lot of new people to the platform.

[09:53] Video games are great, but something that they do is they take our attention away from our communities. And this is totally fine if you're an esports level player. If you are literally a professional at Fortnite, you don't really have to worry about the community aspect of your stream nearly as much as somebody who can't get any kills.

[10:14] Even if you are pretty good, the best of the best are the people that you're competing with. So you need to make sure that you are resonating with people on an emotional, human being level.

[10:28] And the way that you do this is by increasing your Just Chatting time. That is your time to literally sit there and connect with your community. Now this has worked so well for not only myself but many of my clients that I coaching that they have almost completely given up gaming as part of their content strategy And instead a lot of them are focusing primarily on just chatting

[10:53] and getting into other styles of content like podcasting. Now, games are important, and to most of us, they always will be. But if you want that community of people to follow you around, no matter

[11:06] what game you play, it's incredibly important that you and your personality is the star of the show, not necessarily the game. You want your stream to transcend just being about

[11:18] a single game and instead be about you. The next piece of advice is probably one of the most helpful pieces of advice that I could give you with the state of the current Twitch meta. Harry Teller from Alpha Gaming actually talked about this in a video recently as well,

[11:35] and that is about how you need to be creating content on multiple platforms. So back in the day when Twitch was less saturated, just streaming and being there was generally enough to help a stream grow.

[11:49] However, with the level of saturation, something that you need to think about is discoverability. How are people actually finding your stream? Now obviously, choosing a game that is going to help you appear in the top couple of rows on the game directory

[12:03] can be really helpful, but sometimes we can't do that. We might be really excited about something else, or maybe that's just not the content that's going to work out best for us. If you think about

[12:15] something like social media or YouTube or even a podcast, those styles of content have an algorithm, which means it doesn't mean how many people are watching the video, how many people are following

[12:28] you, how many people are subscribed to you, you might still be able to get that content in front of a lot of people depending on how well that content peaks the algorithm.

[12:40] This is also a reason why I don't recommend people stream six or seven days a week and instead stream less so that you can focus on building your brand in multiple spaces.

[12:52] Create a YouTube channel or create a podcast, make some other kind of content that you can become known for and what you want to do here is figure out who your audience is going to be for that specific piece of content figure out what their problems

[13:06] are and then serve solutions for their problems inside of that content we can get into this in another future video let me know if you want me to go in depth about building a podcast or a YouTube channel or just diversifying your

[13:21] brand in general my next strategy for you is going to help you with those periods during your stream where the chat conversation just isn't flowing, where nobody's really talking, and you're not sure why, but you want to get the conversation going again.

[13:36] Now, this is something I struggled with for a long time, was like, how do I get people talking in my stream? And now we have a constant conversation because I learned this strategy very, very well. And this is called a question of the day strategy.

[13:50] The way that this works is you choose one question, you make it the title of your stream, and you ask all the people who come in who start chatting with you. Now, you don't want to pull your lurkers out of lurk,

[14:02] so if somebody follows the channel and you ask them this question, it can actually turn them off from your content because they're just trying to lurk. But this was a fantastic way to get people more invested into the conversation. You can use any question for this, whatever you feel like fits your brand,

[14:17] whatever you're most comfortable with. But the questions that I actually had the best success with were the questions that were really deep. So instead of asking, does pineapple really belong on pizza or is a hot dog a sandwich?

[14:31] I would ask, what is your biggest goal that you're working towards right now? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? What was your favorite memory in life? These kinds of questions have actually been researched by scientists and proven to be

[14:45] the best kinds of questions for generating more intimacy in romantic relationships. And I feel like the same holds true for streaming relationships as well. If people feel like you know more about them and you know them at a deeper level, they're more likely to resonate with you, to trust you, and to show up for you consistently and to actually care about you.

[15:05] The question of the day strategy is also meant to teach you a bigger skill here. So at some point, you're going to have enough conversation in your community. You're not going to need a question of the day nearly as much.

[15:17] But the skill that you're really trying to learn is to keep a question in the back of your mind at all times during your stream. And if chat conversation ever seems to slow down, you pull that question out and you just ask it of everyone that is watching.

[15:32] Because people get invested and excited when they feel like you actually care about their opinions. This can be really difficult to do, but I want you to work towards being a person who the entire time they're streaming,

[15:45] They're looking for more questions to ask their community to keep the conversation going. This next piece of advice I have for you is also going to be pretty divisive, so I encourage you to try it both ways and figure out what's going to work best for you.

[16:00] I actually encourage people to watch their view count Now I know traditionally people said don watch your view count because it might get in your head it might prevent you from being able to perform your best and you might get really freaked out and then that shows on camera and that not a good thing But

[16:16] you might consider leaving it on. Here's why. Your view count can actually be an incredible tool for instant feedback about your streams. Without watching my view count, I wouldn't know that

[16:28] People love it when I get on my soapbox. And then I do things that happen during your stream too that can clue you in where your viewer count goes up consistently every time that you do it or down consistently every time you do it.

[16:41] And that way you'll know what is resonating with people and what isn't. So if your viewer count is really, really getting in your head and you have to turn it off all the time, that's totally fine. but I encourage you to try and learn how to rise above it and figure out that your self-worth is

[16:57] not just coming from the numbers. In fact, it's not coming from the numbers at all. You should be so seated in your own self-confidence that you can see those numbers fluctuate and you still feel confident and okay. Try to work towards being that person, maybe. Let's get to the big one here and

[17:15] talk about your content. Everyone says content is king. They're not completely wrong. So we've said it before, just because you have great graphics and otherwise great branding and you're streaming

[17:32] a game that's good for you and you're actually going to appear in the top couple of rows, you're having a great schedule and you feel like your stream is great doesn't necessarily mean that it is. So just showing up is not nearly enough. You have to give people something to

[17:50] show up for from the viewership side. You being live is great, but unless people are actually getting something from your stream, they're not going to show up routinely, consistently, get passionate about it, share your stream with all of their friends, start tweeting about you,

[18:06] jump in your discord and talk in there daily. That doesn't happen unless they get something from your stream. This generally comes in four different ways. Now, the most traditional one you've heard of before is entertainment. We all know what entertainment is. It's making people

[18:21] laugh, making people cry, making people have a really strong emotion. But there's also three other things that aren't necessarily as talked about. Now, I think the second most talked about

[18:33] value that you can put into your Twitch content is relational value. So networking, right? These are the people that have grown their stream by getting to know a lot of different people, going into a ton of different streams, and making a lot of friends. The problem with

[18:48] networking is that it's really, really difficult to do consistently, and it doesn't scale very well. If you're spending 15 minutes in each stream, the figure you get can't change that

[19:01] amount of time that you're spending in the streams necessarily. So the way that relational value work to grow dreamers is really helpful, but unless it's coupled with one or all of the

[19:13] other values, it can be really difficult to maintain. The third value is inspirational slash motivational value, and this is a value that is all about you inspiring or motivating

[19:25] people to get up off their couch and to accomplish something with their lives. You generally do this by telling a story to people. So you've overcome something in your life, and you share that thing you've overcome with the people that are currently going through that experience.

[19:40] So if you had depression really bad, but now you're through it and you've gotten through that experience and you know all the strategies to overcome it, inspirational and motivational content creators would share that story of how they overcame that depression and they

[19:54] would share that experience with their community. The fourth type of value is educational and that is like this video and like my stream. And it's all about teaching people something.

[20:06] And education, I mean, people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to college. It's very, very valuable for helping people become the person that they want to be in their life. You don't have to teach people about Twitch, though.

[20:18] You can teach them about building cars or wrestling or the LGBTQ and sex work. You can teach them about so many different things. ultimately what you need to know about content is just because you promote something doesn't mean

[20:36] that exposure is necessarily going to do anything for you unless the space is good so you want to prioritize making the space as good as you can make your screen as good as you can before you start trying to throw it at a bunch of people and just hope that they resonate it because

[20:52] resonate with it because you you showed it to them now different things are going to work for different people here let me know what you feel like the best advice was in this video down in the comments or if you need some help and you just don't understand the stuff on your own feel free

[21:07] to head over to patreon there's one-on-one coaching and group coaching that might be helpful for you other than that i love you all so much thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe and i'll see you in the next video okay bye

[21:27] you