Livestreamers have recently risen to pop-culture fame, but who are they? I've been obsessed with gaming and an active user of Twitch and other platforms for many years and want to spotlight the streamers you may or may not know of. If you're interested in more deep-dives into your favorite content creators and the broader gaming industry, make sure to subscribe!
Influencers are a great way to build brand equity and spread the word about your product, especially if you are trying to target a specific audience. When evaluating influencers, it's easy to get caught up in the numbers, followers, subscribers, likes, and comments, but what these numbers don't capture is whether or not those interactions are superficial or genuinely engaged with the content. One platform that should be the focus of all brands looking towards influencer marketing is Twitch. Streamers on Twitch are not just people playing video games; they truly are community engineers.
The unique thing about Twitch is whether a streamer has hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of viewers, there's an opportunity to leverage their unique audience as a platform for your brand. Whether it be passive marketing featuring a product in the video frame, a sponsored stream where the streamer explicitly highlights your product, or any number of other unique marketing vectors on the platform, you'll be able to generate organic and authentic engagement. The relationship between streamer and viewer is much deeper than that of Instagram or YouTube; the real-time aspect of being able to ask a question in the chat and have the influencer not only acknowledge you but respond to you is something extraordinary. The type of engagement is more similar to a longtime friend than merely a personality on the internet; it's a level of connectedness that's hard, or even impossible, to achieve through photos, audio, or even traditional video. According to Neilsen, "84% of consumers say they trust word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family above all other sources of advertising." Streamers are creating this kind of organic, friendship-type, relationship, which in turn allows them to take the model of word-of-mouth style trust, and scale it within their community.
Twitch no longer is just about gaming, either. While the majority of the content revolves around video games, there are also talk shows hosted on the platform, as well as niche categories like cooking and art. With upwards of 2.2 million broadcasters on Twitch, no matter what your product, there's a community somewhere, perfectly aligned for you. Most streamers also go live for several hours during the day. Streamers uniquely open up their lives to their community, sharing things like their fitness routine, what they did last weekend or details about their favorite sneakers; these are the types of engagements that define a streamer's community. Maybe you're a fitness supplement company looking to target a new kind of demographic, partnering with a streamer who can give their stamp of approval and share your products with a new audience is invaluable. Additionally, according to Twitch, users are watching 95 minutes per day on average.
Hopefully, this gives some insight into the extraordinary opportunity for brands to leverage streamers, both big and small. Avoid looking at the top line number of followers, and look at the actual engagement happening in each stream (concurrent viewers and chat activity for example). Best of all, according to Momentum WorldWide's "We Know Gamers Study 2017", 80% of Twitch viewers are open to brands sponsoring a specific gamer or team and 40% are more likely to make a purchase if endorsed by a streamer admired by the individual, keep that in mind!
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