Everyone starts at the same place, fresh & new on twitch or another streaming platform reaching toward the common goal of having an audience to interact with. Some have found the efforts of growing their audience difficult, especially early on and so I found myself inspired to make this guide.

Start with the basics, your friends and family.

Straight up, the people most likely to be your very first viewers are your friends. Write a friendly message letting them know you're getting into streaming. Ask them to support you simply by being there and active in your chat. Your friends are going to be your biggest & best supporters day 1.

Be active in other communities.

Be active in communities! Not just in other people's streams but their discords too! The more active you are, the more people will remember you. This matters because most communities have going live channels in their discord. This is an appropriate place to non-invasively mention your stream in . The friends you've already made in these communities will no doubt see this and come say hi, maybe even your big streamer friend too!

Be active on social media.

I don't mean posting or telling people you're live, but engaging with other people. Find conversations to join in on. Make jokes & comment on other peoples content. If you've got no followers, engaging in the content of others is a great way to get your name out there and start to grow your social circle. People will see your comments, and if they like your contribution they'll check out your profile. So be sure your timeline has some of your own content on it for other people to see when they view your profile. Engaging with others, commenting on their stuff, adding to conversation is easily THE BEST way to get known as you're starting to grow.

Make content outside of twitch.

Discoverability is difficult, almost nonexistant on platforms like twitch for new streamers. On this specific point I think CapsLockKeyon said it best with:

If you make content outside of twitch that is easily passed around like on Twitter, your name is more likely to get out there which is the hard part about twitch. Discoverability!

When you're just starting out streaming you can further leverage your social media accounts for growth by creating content on them. You might not have gaming content ready to share but that's okay, just be your best self, share your personality & your sense of humor. You want to engage people that like you for you. For example, if you have an idea for a short video skit like a vine, record publish it!

After your stream don't forget!

After your stream ends, talk about it on social media. Thank your major supporters, and tag them if you follow them. It's a great way to grow your following. People love seeing the recipients of their support how grateful they are for it. To elaborate further on showing that gratitude: Did someone raid you? Shout them out with how much that means to you. Did someone make a clip? Drop a tweet thanking them & tagging them! Take the time to find & link to their social profiles so the people who supported you get alerted! They'll no doubt comment and their followers will see that and probably check you out too.

Closing thoughts

People appreciate you being your best self. That said, just enjoy what you're doing. Try not to stress over the numbers & be grateful for the viewers & chatters as you get them. The happier you are on your stream, the more that'll infect your viewers and the better the odds you have of turning that viewer into a follower. That first impression matters. Happiness is contagious after all.

If you found this helpful & want a sweet place to network, consider joining our discord!

Special thanks...

I'd like to shoutout WhoarderOfBabelOn, CapsLockKeyon & SmalPoxx for giving me their input with this article & pointing out typos. You should check them out. They're 3 streamers I highly recommend networking with and learning from.

Spamming links not working to grow your twitch following? You're not doing it right!

Would you believe it's easiest to grow your following without ever sharing links? I'll explain that & more in this article!

Social Media Promotion

No doubt you're already using social media to promote yourself & if not you should be! Given that social media alone has driven the growth of countless brands it will easily be the best source of free traffic you're going to have access to early on in your career as a content creator. If what you're doing is spamming links, you're hurting yourself by not working with these social media engines. By working with these social media platforms, posting interactive content that makes people want to interact with you.That will make the platform connect people to you, as that's what they're built to do is connect people.

Links such as live now posts don't effectively connect people on the platforms in question, so it would benefit you to stop prioritizing live now posts. The live nows don't just harm the reach of the post with the link in it, but they affect the posts after that. Links as a post type (being any post with a link embeded) are penalized merely because social media platforms want to keep their traffic on their own site where it's most profitable. Links however also lower the reach of posts after that, because if the one before it appeared generic the algorithm will assume this next post probably is too. If a post does well and has a good engagement ratio, the posts after it will not suffer any penalizations in reach and exposure in reach & exposure. It's easy to make a quality engaging post by merely inspiring interaction with visual stimulation, and not punishing your initial reach by including a link.

So if links on social media are penalized in reach, what do you do to still reach people if you're not posting links?

In the instance of Facebook you should have a "learn more" button on your page that links to your twitch stream. If you do, then your FB followers can use it to get to your stream without having to click on a post containing a link. For Twitter you can put this link in your biography. All social media platforms value engagement above all else. Comments matter more than shares, which matter more than likes. Earn that interaction before your stream & it will get more eyes on your stream as well as interaction within it!

Let's elaborate on how to share more than just links & how to interact with your audience on social media. It's as simple as posting pictures & video clips of your content, asking your audience questions or telling them about your day. Those are just some basic examples to get you started as there's lots you can do to interact with your audience, even posts telling that you're live (as long as you make it a captivating video or picture)!

Taking all of the above into consideration, you can now easily promote yourself without penalty by merely posting in advance of your streams in an engaging manner. This promo content should be a video clip or a picture, grabbing the attention of your potential viewers, saying what you're going to do when you go live and at what time. Be entertaining about it though. If you can make them smile or laugh you're doing it right because those people are the ones that are going to like/comment/share your posts.

If anybody wants to grow, you need to learn how to promote yourselves. You can take a lot of pointers from wrestling turns out. When promoting your channel it always needs to be about what you do and who you are. As what Dusty Rhodes does in the ring and who he is and what he's about.... What do you do in your channel? What are you about?

What's Your Ring? What are you going to show me? Make Me want to buy a ticket to your event, before the event. Not just every time you are live already. ~ CryptixFTW.

Sell ^that^ ticket every time you promote your streams. The people that do it grow explosively. Every time you ever heard last-minute something you wanted to attend was happening, you probably didn't go because you had no notice. Give your followers the notice & get them HYPED about it!

Networking with other streamers

Seriously, this is sofa-king huge. They're not your competition. Think back to live TV, remember how the post-roll would mention what was next and sometimes keep you there to watch it? That's what streamers should be doing for each other at the end of streams.

A regular amount of time needs to be dedicated to networking. Time needs to be spent being a part of other people's streams too. Other streamers will remember your name if you're active in their stream chat. This is a great way to make some new friends.

You can one-up that interaction by ending your streams with raids. Shout out a friend that's live, direct your viewers to them. Try to make it a different person every time and keep some variety in there. Your show is essentially at an end, so you might as well find a show that's worth watching and direct the eyes of your viewers there. This will come back around for you in the long run, but you need to be proactive about it. People won't return that favor if you haven't done it, and enough to leave a mark. It doesn't matter if you only have 2 viewers, you're making someone feel really good when you give those viewers to them and that will make them more inclined to want to return the favor.

Niche Content Websites & Blogging

Websites are another fun & interactive way to keep in touch with your viewerbase. Livestreaming is wonderful for quickly connecting with people but is highly restricted by it's inconveniance. Live streaming is great for quickly connecting with people but it's also just inconvienant. Let's think about TV for a moment as a comparison. Do you tune in for live programs or do you watch it on demand with services such as YouTube & Netflix? Probably on demand right? Don't you think the majority of content consumers want to consume content on their own schedule? So make content for them! You first thought is probably YT and that's great (no really it is), but written content ranks extremely well on search engines & has the benefit of being easy to consume on demand.

There are several community websites that will let you publicly publish on them & LGC is a wonderful example. The benefits to publishing content on these community sites is that they usually have well a established social media presence & good SEO driving their traffic. If you publish & submit content on these websites your content can be earning you numerous additional views from the eyes already being drawn to those websites, and a measurable ammount of those will convert to followers, viewers & donors.

On our website we encourage your twitch be embedded in your bio as it appears beneath each of your published pieces of content. When you publish here, we want you to get real benefit from it. Millions of people are always searching for new content to absorb at their own rate. We want to help put you in front of them. All you have to do is register (its free)! Please read our publishing guidelines before you submit content!