Every single day I see someone else ask how they can get more viewers on Twitch.

When I ask what they are doing to grow their audience I usually get the same answer. Most of the time they respond and say they are “just streaming”. Or they are working on the quality of their stream.

And it doesn’t shock me.

Considering the most common advice that gets passed around is variations of this exact thing:

The problem is that the build it “stream and they will come” method doesn’t work well.

If it did… there wouldn’t be thousands of frustrated streamers wondering why their chat was a ghost town.

A breakdown of how many #Twitch viewers per streamer. 📈 It's lonely at the top. 🚀#twitchstreamer #esports #gaming pic.twitter.com/937RalJYwQ

— Gameonaire (@gameonaire) March 10, 2018

But don’t worry.

In this post I’m going to show you 3 things you can do to start building your twitch audience tonight.

And we’ll be leveraging just one of the many promotion platforms available to you to really level up your stream.

How Twitter Can Grow Your Stream

You don’t want to get stuck inside the Twitch platform. There’s millions of gamers outside of Twitch.

Believe it or not. There’s still millions of gamers who don’t even know what Twitch is. (PogChamp)

So while some people are streaming and praying that someone scrolls down far enough and randomly clicks on their stream with 1-10 viewers…

…I’m going to show you how to go out and build a Twitch following and then redirect them to your stream.

Twitter is one of the biggest social platforms for gamers. If you don’t have a Twitter account already… go make one now.

We’re going to be using a few methods to grow our Twitter following and get them onto your stream.

Method #1: Follow/Unfollow

If you have zero followers, then no one will see your posts. This method will boost your follower count quickly.

If you’ve been around Twitter for any amount of time then you’ve probably heard of this tip. But we’re going to pour gasoline on it.

Very basically, we’ll be following people on Twitter and a portion of those people will follow us back. The ones who don’t follow back, we unfollow and continue this process each day. Over time you’ll manually build your twitter followers.

But the key here is to get people to follow you who are potential stream viewers. If your followers aren’t potential viewers or fans, then you’re doing nothing but boosting your own ego.

I’d much rather have a low follower count with active raving fans, than a huge follower list of bots, inactive users, and users who aren’t targeted. Because those are the ones who will end up on my stream.

Let’s break it down to figure out how to find these people.

We’re looking for two criteria:

1. Someone who may be interested in watching my stream.
2. Someone who is active on Twitter. (Important! If someone is inactive, they won’t engage with us. Making it a waste of time which can be spent elsewhere.)

To meet both of those criteria we can use three strategies.

Strategy #1: Find people who stream similar games to you and follow them. We can go through their follower list and follow people who we think are targeted viewers. Additionally, when they post new content we can see everyone who engages with their content. That means these people are both targeted AND active, so it’s a no brainer.

Strategy #2: We find them using Twitter’s search engine. Use hashtags and search terms related to your game, stream, or community to find people tweeting similar things.

With using twitter search you’ll want to sort it by “latest”.

In this example, I just used the search term “Fortnite”. If I’m a Fortnite streamer, you’d think this is a great search term to use right?

Wrong! If you look closely you see people posting things in different languages, other content creators posting their content, some of them are good. But we want to spend our time most efficiently.

Let’s get a little more creative:

My next attempt I used the term “fortnite win”.

In the first few results we found 5 highly targeted people who just posted in the last 5 minutes. These are definitely the ones we want to follow.

And take a note of @eldritchium. (The tweet on the left) We’ll get back to him in one of the next methods.

If you take the time to think of phrases like this you can do dozens of searches and find tons of highly qualified users that will turn into viewers.

Method #2: Engage and Interact

Think of Twitter as a bar or a wine mixer.

Scratch that.

We’re nerds so that reference will probably miss.

Think of Twitter as a giant trade chat! (There we go…)

You’re doing it wrong if your twitter feed looks anything like this:

Twitter is NOT a broadcasting platform. You have to engage with the community.

And as the great philosopher “Kool & The Gang” once said: “Get your back up off the wall. Dance. Come on!”

Following people and posting tweets is one thing. But by engaging people directly and joining the conversation you’ll find that people actually care about what you have to say. THIS is how you turn a rando into a raving fan.

You’ll want to find what the community is saying by using Strategy #2 in the previous method. Search on twitter to find people in the community.

Twitter gives you four tools to interact with the community:

• Favorite/Liking their tweets – Lowest level of interaction but it at least gets you in front of them for minimal effort
• Retweeting – Good and relevant content that you think your audience will also like
• Commenting/Responding – Direct interaction with the community.
• Direct Message (DM) – Private conversations to really network.

Remember @eldritchium?

He’s the perfect candidate to mix it up with.

Here’s how I’d do it:

This person is so excited that they won their first game that they want to share it with the world. And now YOU’RE noticing it.

They will wonder who you are, check out your page (which has a link to your stream, past clips, and other fun content for the audience, right?). Some will follow and some will respond.

And if they respond, now you have a chance to refer them to your stream.

This is just one example with one search term. It takes a few seconds to respond to someone and it can mean the world to them. Which they’ll remember and repay you as a viewer, follower, or subscriber.

As a streamer you should know how important it is to engage with your audience while you’re streaming. Why wouldn’t you do it while you promote your stream?! Get in the trenches.

Method #3: Live Events and Movements

There will always be unique times in your market when your little niche in Twitter is exploding with activity.

• During a new game or expansion launch
• Game updates and Patches
• New seasons in game
• Live events (tournaments, matches, convention panels)
• Industry news
• Streamer drama

You’ll see twitter activity go through the roof.

This is the prime time to create related content to get it shared and in front of an exponential amount of targeted viewers.

It’s in these moments that joining conversation threads on Twitter can turn into hundreds of followers.

Your tweets can get picked up by industry news sites.

This is how people get “lucky”.

They sit in the trenches and put in the work. And when the right time comes they fire their bullets. And when they hit… you’ll have an avalanche of viewers come.

Even when they miss you’ll have an amplified results because of everyone’s excitement.

But if you aren’t paying attention… Or worse, if you aren’t even on Twitter. Every other streamer that is savvy enough to get in front of those viewers is stealing your audience.

How does this turn into a bigger audience?

This isn’t everything you can do with twitter. This is just three simple methods that you can put to work for you right now that you WILL show results.

You now have an action plan to put to work instead of hoping and praying that someone just happens to comes to your stream.

The best part of it?

These are REAL viewers.

They aren’t other streamers “supporting” you. They aren’t your friends or your mom. (Love you, Mom!)

And as your Twitter following grows you can:

• Push them to your stream when you go live.
• Get them to share your content and give it more legs.
• Easily get enough viewers to become a Twitch Affiliate.
• Use it as leverage and network with other streamers by sharing their content. Hint: Want to get on bigger streamers radar so they raid you?
• Sponsorship deals

Everything gets amplified as you grow your audience on social platforms.

Up next? We’ll be covering Reddit and how you can build your audience with that platform.

Don’t believe any of this will work? You can follow along as I build the @Gameonaire twitter account. It’s a brand new account as I release this post that I wanted to build and showcase that this stuff actually works. Maybe I’ll post an update post with results.