Setting Up The Perfect Look For Your Stream
There are a lot of different elements that go into becoming a success on Twitch. Being engaging enough to build an audience, playing the right games (or doing the right activities on stream), and navigating social media can all help you turn your nerdy passion into a profitable business. However, if you are going to be like most successful streamers, you’re going to need a camera setup, and what’s more, you’re going to need some aspect of visual production to your stream. Here, we’re going to look at how to set up the look for your stream that gives you the best chance of success.
Image Source – Pixabay License
Establish your brand with banners
First of all, let’s talk about the first thing that people will see when they come onto your channel, whether you’re online or offline. This is usually going to be the banners and the panels that surround the stream itself. The website has guidelines on what measurements these aspects of your channel’s design should be, but there are also plenty of resources that can help you see more about how to create a great looking banner and panel headings for the channel. This will effectively help establish a brand. Creating a cutesy, cool, or nerdy set of banners and panels can help the audience know what kind of personality and content to expect.
Use overlays
Unlike banners and panels, overlays are not placed around the stream decoratively. Rather, they are used in the broadcast themselves, controlled within streaming software like OBS or Streamlabs. Some overlays will be used as new scenes, such as a “BRB” scene or “Stream Starting Soon” scene. However, most of the top streamers will have overlays that go over the stream when it’s live. They might frame the streamer’s webcam, for instance, or they may simply have overlays that show information on the stream such as the last audience member to subscribe or the top donation so far on the stream. Either way, overlays can go a long way to cement the professionalism of the stream.
Put thought into your emotes
While they may not be a part of the stream itself, the emotes that your subscribers get as a reward for subscribing to you is very much a part of the stream experience. They are emoticons that are used to cement a shared kind of communication, very much contributing to the brand and vibe of the stream. As such, it’s important to choose your emotes with care and to ensure that you’re investing in quality ones that your audience will want to use. There are plenty of websites you can find more information on the best Twitch emote artists if you’re looking to commission them. A lot of streamers will create their own emotes, but that’s a risk you have to decide you want to take.
Image Source – Pixabay License
Don’t skip the alerts
Stream alerts are, effectively, some of the biggest hype generators for the stream. You can set up both animations and sounds to play whenever someone follows the stream, subscribes to it (with different alerts for different tiers of subscriptions), donates, hosts, raids, and so on. Viewers genuinely like seeing their name pop up on the screen when they interact with the stream, so it’s important not to neglect them. A lot of streamers will use various pop culture animations and sound effects to create an easy hype moment, but there are those who create their own, as well. It’s always a good idea to choose alerts that have some potential to grab the attention of the chat and get them in on the hype.
Quality is crucial
Aside from the branding elements of the stream, we have to talk about the look of you, the streamer, if you’re getting on the webcam. Before we get into aspects of your outfits, decor, and how you brand yourself, visually, it’s important to talk about how clear any image you display is going to be. Make sure you’re doing your research when choosing the right webcam for your stream. A low-quality webcam can make you look blurry on screen, creating artifacts that look distinctly amateurish. If you’re going to be going on the webcam, then it’s wise to at least invest in making sure that it’s going to look good enough to broadcast in the first place.
Look the part
You want to appear comfortable on stream so it is recommended that you dress in a way that suits your sense of style and doesn’t feel overly unnatural. However, at the same time, you want to take the time to present yourself well. You may even want to lean into the nerdy chic side of your wardrobe to better appeal to your audience. For instance, you can learn more about glasses frames that have that special kind of chic, opt for pop culture branded t-shirts, and the like. What’s important, however, is that you take the time to groom and present yourself well for the stream.
Image Source – Pixabay License
Set up your environment
Aside from your own appearance, you also need to think about how you set up the streaming environment around you. If you’re going for a greenscreen, for instance, you may not need to think about what your usual backdrop looks like. Most streamers who use a greenscreen will do so to appear over the game or app they are running, rather than setting a background for themselves. Otherwise, however, it’s a good idea to make sure that the background is neat (or at least not messy or dirty) and that your lighting is good enough to make sure you stand out from the background without being too sharply in focus. A lot of streamers will use things like colored lights in the background to set their own ambiance as well.
Show off your passion
If you aren’t using a greenscreen, then many successful streamers recommend that you use your environment to give your viewers a good indication of who you are. Although both the broadcasters and audience on Twitch have become a more diverse lot, especially as of late, there’s no denying that the overwhelming majority of people on the website have a deep affinity for “nerd culture,” be it movies, comics, anime, videogames, or otherwise. It was set up as a video game streaming website, first and foremost, and still is primarily used as such, after all. To that end, using decor that speaks to your pop culture preferences and fandoms can help you establish something of a bond with your viewers through your shared likes.
Stay consistent on social media
Most successful streamers (though not all) use social media to help advertise their stream, further builder their brand and interact with their community. If you’re using a social media account to market your stream, then you need to commit to it being an account specifically for the stream. As such, you want to make sure that all of the visual brandings matches the panels, banners, and overlays of the stream. If your visuals are inconsistent, then you might find that a lot of people do not recognize your social media profiles as being linked to your streams, which can make it harder for either to effectively market the other. Consistency is the key to all forms of visual marketing.
If you aim to truly be a success on Twitch, then you need to invest in creating a professional broadcast, which means improving the visual quality, too. Hopefully, the tips above help with that.