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!