What's up guys, welcome back once again to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel
where we aim to teach you everything you need to know to make it as a successful
streamer or content creator in the gaming niche. so today we're going to be
looking at 5 tips to help you network as a Twitch streamer and I know that
networking, that word just makes me think of LinkedIn and CV's and emails and
things like that because it's such a business-ey word, but it really is an important
skill that you're going to need to learn to grow as a Twitch streamer, because it
will really help you grow as long as you do it right. So today we're going to be
covering five tips, let's jump in!
Tip number one is to be genuine, and you can
apply this tip across all of the other tips I'm going to be sharing in this
video. There is no point networking unless you are being genuine, it is not
about racing up the ladder and trying to get yourself to the top of the Twitch
directories, it's about building bridges and actually building real relationships
and friendships with other people in the community who may in turn help you as
you help them. Trust me there is no bigger turnoff than somebody coming into
discord or you know messaging you on Twitter and saying hey can you check out
my channel, can you promote it, can you share it? If you're just going to be
spamming your Twitch URL or your latest video to people, people are going
to see straight through that. You're just trying to help yourself,
you're not honestly trying to build a real friendship and a real relationship
and that can end up damaging your brand rather than helping it. If however you
are genuine and you're building real relationships and friendships with
people then over time these people are going to be helping you as much as you
help them, so really I want to drill that point home, the biggest takeaway from
networking is that you have to be genuine and not spammy and just trying
to promote yourself. Tip number two is to be active on at least 3 different
platforms and for me I recommend that those are Twitch or whatever website
your streaming to but I imagine most of you are streaming to Twitch, Discord and
Twitter. I think these are the key three to have in your tool kit because
that is where I believe the majority of the community are socializing, hanging
out and active. So let's cover those in a little bit
more detail. So first of all Twitch, that might sound a little bit strange because
you're already streaming to Twitch so maybe you know I'm already active on
Twitch, but I'm talking more about the other people that are streaming on
Twitch. Maybe you stream a small game that only
gets you know a couple of thousand people watching across the whole
directory. Really find those other channels that are streaming your game go
and hang out in those channels, take part in the chat don't just be promoting
yourself but actually be genuinely interested in the people that are
streaming it. Ask them questions and hopefully they'll ask you questions back,
remember this isn't a short-term hang out on their stream once and
then send them your link at the end of the stream. I really want to discourage
that, it's more about finding people that you really enjoy watching, hanging out in
their chat and actually making a real friendship. Secondly let's look at
Discord. Now Discord has only been around for a few years but it's kind of
hard to imagine streaming and gaming life without it. It's had that big of an impact. A
lot of your favorite streamers probably have their own Discord channels that are
busy and bustling with lots of people talking, even after the streamers ended
people are still talking about things, movies, whatever but that is the
sign of a great community that the streamer has built one that keeps going
even when the stream is down. So what I want you to do is to get involved in
some of these streamers Discord's. People that you genuinely do like, get in there and
talk to people, help people out, people are always having questions about
streaming or whatnot and if you can help people out you're gonna get recognized
in that community and it's all about getting your name out there, because you
know one day maybe they stumble across your stream and they recognize the name.
Again, as always please do not just join Discord servers and spam people or
message people with your link asking them to check out your stream, it's gonna
damage your reputation more than it's going to help it, and maybe a quick tip
is if you haven't yet joined the Gaming Careers Discord, there's so many people I
think over 600 people now all talking about streaming and helping each other
out so there is an opportunity to chat in there as well.
Eventually you might get to the point where you want to start your own Discord
server but that might be a little bit further down the line. I would encourage
doing that when you know you're gonna get quite a few members
and there's going to be quite a lot of chitter chatter, because if you're doing
it right from the beginning and you're only getting a few people joining
they're probably going to leave when they see that it's not that active in
the Discord, so I would encourage being active in other people's Discord's before
building your own as you grow your audience. The final of the three platform
that we're going to talk about is Twitter, now I have held off on Twitter
for such a long time, when I started this channel I decided to make a Twitter
account and I haven't really done that much with it until recently. Over the
last three to six months I've really understood what Twitter is all about and
there's so many streamers on there talking and messaging each other and
including each other and mentioning each other's streams and things like that.
It's such an important community to get yourselves involved in, there's some
great hashtags to follow like support small streamers,
there's hundreds of people that are going through the process of getting
affiliate and partnership and this is a really great way to network with
different people and you know ask questions and really involve yourself.
Pretty much every streamer has a Twitter so if you go and check out somebody on
Twitch you've really enjoyed it why don't you just send them a tweet
afterwards saying really enjoyed watching your stream and tag them. People
love seeing themselves mentioned in Twitter comments so I would definitely
recommend getting active on Twitter, follow Gaming Careers whilst you're at
it, we try and share some motivational posts on Mondays and Wednesdays as well
as loads of useful information so get yourself a Twitter account. Tip number
three is to take advantage of hosting or auto hosting on Twitch. For those of you
that don't know, you can host other channels when you're not online on
Twitch, so say somebody comes to your Twitch page you're not online, you can
actually be hosting somebody else's stream so they'll still get to watch
somebody else's stream through your page and Twitch makes it super obvious that
they're not watching you and you're watching somebody else and that you've
chosen to host that person. But it's a really great way not only to show your
support to fellow Twitch streamers, people that you're networking with, but
also to keep the live entertainment going after you finish your stream.
Twitch actually made it even easier with a feature called auto host which is
somewhere in your settings in the backend of Twitch, you can basically
fill out a list of streamers and Twitch will pick from those anybody that is
live as soon as you finish streaming, and automatically host one of these other
streamers. Another great way to help others and grow your channel. Tip number
four is to interact with other streamers on these platforms and I've kind of
covered this but I want to really drill home a point here. If somebody comes into
your stream and maybe you're a brand-new streamer and you don't get many viewers,
but somebody comes in and they start talking to you on chat, find that person
on Twitter and tweet them after they've finished watching your stream and just
say thanks for stopping by. People love seeing that kind of thing,
it doesn't matter if it's a viewer or somebody that subscribed maybe or
somebody that hosted you, just be involved in thanking them through these
social medias or add them to your auto host list. It's really about helping
others as you would like to be helped yourselves, and don't expect anything
back, you're purely doing that because you enjoyed them stopping by your stream
or you enjoyed them hosting a stream and you wanted to say thank you, and that's
all you're doing, is being genuine and thanking them later. I've put a couple of
examples on stream now of some of the Gaming Careers community that I see
doing this and they're doing it really well. People love seeing these
mentions on Twitter and some of them will retweet it or like it or
however they want to show their appreciation. Tip number five is all
about helping newcomers as you would have liked to have been helped yourself.
Twitch is a scary place for newcomers and maybe there are some streamers that
are coming into your directory that have lower view counts than you. It's not all
about going for people that have higher view counts and trying to network with
them, as I said this is about building real friendships with people so reach
out to a newcomer, help them out, maybe they have some technical questions
about OBS or all sorts of things like that.
You can really make a difference to somebody stream and if people see that
you're doing that in a genuine way, it's only going to help you. Maybe write a
guide on Medium or on Reddit or something like that, help somebody in
some way, people are really going to appreciate that and are much more likely
to reciprocate in some sort of support. I could keep going forever with these tips
about networking and in particular I'd love to talk a bit more about networking
at conventions and meetups and things like that especially as Twitchcon isn't
that far away, but I'll probably save that for another video. So thank you very
much for watching, as always thank you to our patrons for supporting the Gaming
Careers YouTube channel through our page at patreon.com slash
Gaming Careers. If you'd also like to check it out and consider supporting as
little as a dollar, there's some perks including promotion of your livestream
through our discord so be sure to check that out if that's something that you're
interested in, and subscribers I'll see you in the next video. Peace!
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