Increasing ENGAGEMENT on Your Channel! | HIGHLIGHTS from Creator Camp LIVE (Mar 2025)

Welcome back to Creator Camp Live, episode 12. My name is Snackless, if we haven't met before. I work on the community engagement team at Twitch. Hello, I'm OJ's TV. Uh, I'm a Twitch ambassador, as you can see, uh, and also a Minecraft hardcore streamer. So, we're going to talk about how you as a streamer drive engagement, how you can use collaboration and our built-in tools to your advantage, and how to keep a community that keeps coming back. Did you know that if a user types in your chat that they are more than 50% likely to come back? That's a really powerful stat. And what does that mean, right? It means that we want to get people chatting. It's not enough to have them come in and stay for 10 seconds and try to impress them. We also want them to click. We want them to click and do something that's going to interact in our stream, right? Ideally, we would get them typing, right? But at the very least, maybe we get them engaged with a channel point or an extension or something of that nature. I think one of the strongest ways to retain engagement uh is by essentially using what we have here uh a back and forth conversation. Um and you can have a conversation, you can spark a conversation in a lot of different ways. Uh there can be questions, thoughts, stories, or opinions. That's sort of the toolbox as streamers. A lot of this might seem like race surface level, but you'd be surprised that you can actually ask questions which end up not actually evolving into any kind of conversation. If I were to ask everybody what's their favorite food, it's a very sort of like one and done question. There's not a lot there for me to be able to bounce back off after that has been answered. Uh so open-ended questions are usually a great way to get things started. The topic of thoughts is a really powerful one and and can be a little bit easier. Like maybe you're somebody who's like, "Oh, I find it difficult to even think about questions, right?" Um the thoughts category is a really great one for everyone because even though it might feel a little bit silly to verbalize like what you're thinking while you play the game, that's why people are watching you, right? They're watching you because they want to know what you're thinking, what your reactions are, what you're going to decide to do. And so if you're narrating your actions as you do them, not only does it make your content more accessible, but it also can keep people more engaged in what's going on. Stories are also a really great way uh to kind of keep people's attention. Um have a dig deep into, you know, perhaps the past 10 years of your life and try and sort of ruminate on what you might want to share with your audience. Um, and also you'll find that as you go through your streaming career, uh, that when you have these like thoughts or when you ask questions, people will kind of bring up topics that you didn't know that you had a story about. For example, if somebody mentions a certain country or a certain food, suddenly you'll kind of be reminded of that. And one of the like segments of it was opinions uh, down there. Yeah, up there in the top right. Um, and playful hot takes can lead to some like pretend divide in the chat, such as like cereal or milk in the bowl first. Uh, or whether or not you like when you put the toilet paper on the holder, does the paper go over the top or does it go under the bottom? Um, and you'll quickly find that that is actually a very quick and easy way to engage people in stream by having some kind of ridiculous um, playful uh, opinion. When you are attentive and you keep your chat engaged, there's there's so many opportunities that you can unlock that will get people wanting to come back, eager to unlock, and wanting to participate. Collaborating with other creators results in accelerative growth. Okay? And so, I cannot implore you enough to find some people that you genuinely connect with and connect and then collaborate. try something new, get together, and see if they're a good fit. There's sometimes like a normal lull in your conversation. You know, even as Owen's saying, "Oh, we can talk to our community. We can narrate our actions. We can do all of these things." There's still sometimes like a little bit of silence in between what you're doing. A second voice can really help to break up that silence. And it also gives you something to play off of as you go. I think it's a lot of fun when you have somebody else to either help. I I like to call it help or hinder. You know, in peak, you can help them or you can hinder them, right? And you can apply that to a lot of games and it gives you a lot more to kind of go off of versus playing a game like that all by yourself. I think a really good case study for this is uh SMPPS which stands for survival multiplayers servers. And what that allows for chat is a great way to kind of cross-pollinate audiences with with other streamers. There's probably a lot of uh SMPPS, Minecraft SMPPS if you're in that space chat that you could name off the top of your head over the past five years that have not only been great just because of the content that has happened from them, but also because of the how quickly everybody on that server has grown because everybody's mingling and sharing stories, sharing audiences. Um, another Okay, this is my favorite thing ever. My favorite thing is stream together. So it connects you plus five other people together and from there if you are playing a game together you can share your viewerships and then you can also choose to share your chat so that you can see what people are saying al together it's another great way as Owen said to cross-pollinate it's a really great way to accelerate your growth expand your reach and combine your work together how do I get involved how do I find these people how do I stream how do I stream together where where do I make these connections so I'm just going to do a quick shout out Twitch has a lot of different community programs that can help you make connections, give you unique opportunities, um give you cool things to do. And so some of these are our Twitch Unity Guilds. We have a variety of Unity Guilds that all have open applications available to them. So that's a really great place where you can learn education, connect with other creators, get involved with everything from ray trains to charity opportunities to finding people to who also like to play Minecraft for example. We also have Twitch's creator clubs and those um applications are opens for as well. We also have um meetups in person. Um we have I think we've talked about this before, but I can't stress how important going to inerson events are. Every cool opportunity I've ever had is because I went to an inerson event and somebody was like, "Hey, have you met Snackless?" Every cool thing that I've ever done from like Bungie to working with Lego to all these cool things was because somebody mentioned my name because they met me in person. Twitch is another unique aspect is that it has an entire toolkit basically built specifically to make your stream more interactive. Uh these can come in the range of ex uh extensions um all the way down to like native things that exist inside of the creator dashboard. One of the ones that you are probably the most familiar with is channel points. These are available to affiliates and upwards. They're fully customizable. You name your channel points, you give them an icon, you set your rewards. uh they basically make the foundation of a lot of the interactivity that you're going to see here on Twitch. So, if you give people the incentive to collect those channel points, you'll find that they will run after those uh and that will help your engagement as well. So, that is a you can use the next thing that I would encourage you to use, and I feel like I slept on these for a long time and I'm definitely getting better at them, but are polls and predictions. Okay, people, they love to gamble those channel points on a prediction. You know, it's kind of like, is Owen gonna get blown up by a creeper? I don't know. Right. Like, it's a particularly traumatic thing for you to mention if as a hardcore streamer, that's the worst thing that can happen. Polls are also a really, really great thing to use, especially if you're like feeling a little bit unsure, like if you need direction on like a building in Minecraft or what gun you're going to use in COD. Another great one, we were talking about channel points. Uh, a great way to sort of like quote unquote drain the economy of your audience with channel points is having community challenges. Uh, which is essentially a thing where people can uh, pull channel points towards a shared goal. Uh, so that might be a special like baking stream or something else. Here's an asset to show you how you can actually get to that. You can just go straight up to the dashboard search right now in your Twitch dashboard and type in community challenges or uh you can go along on the left and you give it a name, a description, the amount of days that you want them to have to be able to complete it, how many channel points they need to put in and and off it goes and everybody basically can chip in as a community over time, which is a great way to allow those who can't support financially to feel like they're contributing to your stream. So, um, we've talked in depth about extensions as well on the show and they are covered on our creator camp site, but um, just a quick reminder that extensions give viewers a way to engage with the stream. And there's everything from like voting, pulling up stats for the game that you're playing, like maybe they want to know the stats on your build for a game. You can add captions. There are mini games. And you can find all of these on your creator dashboard. I scroll to the bottom. It says extensions. They are grouped there by different categories, and they are searchable. So, there's some really, really awesome choices here and um things that I'm sure will fit your stream no matter what the vibe is. Establishing an audience and then having that audience feel like a community is what makes Twitch be it's what makes Twitch magic, right? It's the special part of being a Twitch streamer. And viewers will often come for your content, but they will stay for your community. they will stay for a place that feels like home for them, a place where they can connect with other people, and a place where they can look forward to visiting. And so, we're going to talk about some different approaches that you can take when you are building a community of your own. So, something that we're going to talk about is using a platform for your community, right? And so, that could be anything from Discord to having your community be allowed to engage with you or available to engage with you on social media. And why we should consider that it really gives your place um gives your a community a place to exist when you're not live, right? You know, that's the thing about Twitch is that when you're not live, what is live? What is going on behind the scenes? Right? Is there a place where people can connect with you? Is there a place where they can connect with your community? Is there content available on other um platforms or services? Where can they connect? And so having a place where they can do that is a really really great place to keep you at the top of their mind when you're not live streaming. It allows for sharing of your stream, your schedule, discussion, sharing uh sharing of your life, sharing of their lives, right? Maybe you have like I love a food channel. There's nothing I love more than seeing what people are snacking on when I have no snack, right? Maybe you have a pet channel, but these are really great places to connect deeper with your community and foster those connections between each other. Once you've started building up that rapport with your community, you're going to end up having people that you are familiar with, essentially the regulars of your stream. Uh, and as people become regulars of your content, taking the time to recognize them and thanking them for sticking around and supporting you, uh, can go a really long way. Of course, it's important to maintain a healthy creator to fan dynamic. But recognizing people's names as they come into chat and being like, "Oh, great to see you. So wonderful to see you again. Thanks for dropping in." Trying to commit to memory. If somebody was like, "I'm a little bit nervous next week. I've got like a piano exam coming out." I'll try my best. I won't always succeed. Next time if I see their name, I'll be like, "How did it go?" And the last thing we'll talk about is stream your interaction. Engage in your community spaces. Like if you give people a place to hang out, make sure that you also have a presence there in some kind of way. You know, whether that is yawning in a channel, having a watch party, having offstream game nights, like I often will do that too. You know, if I don't have a stream schedule, but I feel like playing a game, maybe I just let them know. I'm like, "Hey, I'm playing a game. Do you want to hang out?" Right? Um is there Q&A threads? What is there available to people that allows you to continue those interactions with them even when you are not live?