Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

How to be Good at Twitch

How to be Good at Twitch

In researching this piece, I was able to find a ton of high quality Let’s Play videos that had a dispiriting lack of views. The fact is, good content isn’t nearly enough. It’s more like good content is the sail and discoverability is the wind—you need both, but the latter may actually be more important. In this tips article, I’ll include techniques for producing good content, getting it to viewers, and creating synergy between the potent combo that is Twitch and YouTube.

Avoid Dead Air

Avoid Dead Air

This one may be a bit obvious. After all, who would want to watch a flavorless video when they could simply go and play the game themselves? Or, you know, watch someone else’s video. To make a video that’s worthwhile, you have to sell yourself as the entertainment and not the game. Nothing makes you seem more boring than absolute silence. Unfortunately, providing colorful commentary is an acquired skill and, early on, your videos are likely to have a lot of dead air. If it becomes too hard to fill a decent portion of your video with interesting things to say, consider recording a post-commentary instead. Despite popular belief, Let’s Plays don’t have to be done live. Write up a script, learn what people enjoy, and before long you’ll be getting better at improvisation. And if post commentary isn’t your thing, editing will be your best friend. Lost content is better than boring content, I promise.

Emulate

Emulate

As with all things, producing decent video content is something that takes practice. There will be underlying principles that govern success and until those principles are ingrained, consciously or subconsciously, it will be difficult to create anything worthwhile. For this reason, studying the styles of the people you admire is a good way to practice. Not only will you figure out what works and doesn’t work for you, but over time, you will come into your own style that people will gravitate towards. And so, what starts off as emulation becomes something unique that viewers can’t find elsewhere.

Open Broadcaster Software

Open Broadcaster Software

As with all things, producing decent video content is something that takes practice. There will be underlying principles that govern success and until those principles are ingrained, consciously or subconsciously, it will be difficult to create anything worthwhile. For this reason, studying the styles of the people you admire is a good way to practice. Not only will you figure out what works and doesn’t work for you, but over time, you will come into your own style that people will gravitate towards. And so, what starts off as emulation becomes something unique that viewers can’t find elsewhere.

Embrace the Synergy of YouTube and Twitch

Embrace the Synergy of YouTube and Twitch

Why limit yourself to just one audience? Especially when Twitch and YouTube are designed to work well together. Live annotations will notify viewers of YouTube videos when the channel’s owner is live on Twitch. Twitch has the ability to send past broadcasts directly to YouTube if elect to skip heavy editing. A great way to get people to your twitch channel is to direct people to it from your YouTube channel through the profile itself, but also through outro panels that alert people to the fact that you even are a streamer. It’s a non-abrasive way of reminding viewers every single time they watch a video of yours.

Outro Panels

Outro Panels

I’m sure you’re familiar with the popular Epic Rap Battles videos on YouTube. Now, picture the ends of the videos. They typically consist of their actors dancing with a few panels linking to channels, videos, social media, etc. What this is meant to do is make it easy to manage the attention of binge watchers. It’s like suggestive selling to your viewer in the most innocuous way possible. And the good news is that they’re absolutely easy to design. Simply download Gimp or Photoshop, make a template that has social media icons, a subscribe button, and an area to place a video. Next, use the picture in picture feature of your video editing software and pop in the video that you want to recommend to your viewer. Then you only need to use YouTube’s built in tools to put panels around the images, creating a clickable area that will carry your viewer away to a designated destination. Easy and effective, right? The only possible downside is that retention rate will be affected very slightly, but most YouTubers agree that the trade-off is worth your while.

Retention Rate

Retention Rate

Retention Rate is the most important piece of data in YouTube’s algorithms that determine how much they promote your video. Put simply, retention rate is how long a viewer watches your content without clicking off. It’s actually a much better measurement of quality than views and is the reason good content is important and dead air will kill you. The upside to let’s plays is that they usually play out over several videos, too. The result is that a hooked viewer will sit through episode after episode, significantly bolstering your channel’s retention rating.

Video Overlays

Video Overlays

Video Overlays are much more than just a gimmick for streamers—they’re a vital tool in your arsenal for engaging your audience. By popping a video overlay onto your stream, you not only provide context for the verbal responses you provide to your stream should you later choose to archive or import to your video to YouTube, but you give them further incentive to interact with you. Now their responses will be included in the video, and that’s not just something you want, but it’s something they commonly want, too. Also, by incorporating a donation tool, you can allow users to input a message that will display alongside a notification in your video. This feature, alongside top donation lists, has been found to motivate users towards tipping.

Persistence

Persistence

Your videos will probably suck at first, but don’t let that dishearten you. Even Pewdiepie is ashamed of his earliest content and has even gone so far as to make some of it private. This is a point you have to persevere to push past. As you slowly grow your audience, your videos will get better and the rate in which people return to your channel will increase naturally.

Editing

Editing

As mentioned before, editing can be a great way to cut dead air out of your video. It is also a great way to add production value and personality to your video. Editing takes practice, though. Once you pick your editing software, spend some time playing around with it. Have some fun trying out your toolset. Not only will you develop your own style, but you will broaden your toolset and begin to consider the variety of options available to your in post while you’re still recording. As for which kind of software to use, many recommend Adobe Premier. A comparable, cheaper, alternative is Pinnacle, though, and will provide more than enough tools for getting started. Mac users can also take pleasure in using iMovie, a surprisingly robust tool that comes preinstalled on most Apple devices.

SEO

SEO

Covering SEO could be an entire post in its own right, but understanding just the basics will go a long way towards getting organic traffic through search engines for your videos. For starters, fill out the full 5000 character field available in the video description. Try to repeat the name of the game where you can, and describe the video using words commonly used in searches. Make sure the first sentence is attention grabbing, as that is what will encourage people to click the link in a search engine; the best search engine rating in the world will matter little if nobody wants to click it. Pick tags that are unique, commonly searched, but rarely used if you can. Minecraft , for example, might be a bad choice. Use Google Webmaster tools to get an idea of what terms will be good to use in your video information.

To top