Considering Twitch for your Team or Company

Possible Direction with Twitch

What is Twitch
Teams and Individuals
Measurable KPIs
First Steps
Community DevRel Examples
Corporate Twitch Channels

What is Twitch

Twitch is a bunch of things, offered nowhere else:

Brand Promotion tool Social Network Hacker Space Crowd-Programming Research platform Artistic Expression Conference Platform Meet People Where They Are

Think of Twitch as a meetup, at first. Remember meetups?

So you have someone with content, or a few people. You have a space. You have people attend. On the side you have people who are hiring, people want to be hired, vendors wanting to sell, and companies wanting to buy.

Meetups are a whole ecosystem that suddenly became nigh but irrelevant in 2020. Good news: We've been doing this Twitch thing for many years, so certainly before COVID-19. And we're getting exceedingly good at it.

What do you want out of Twitch? And what are you willing to put in? Theres are your TOP questions before even creating an account. Some people stream to teach others, or promote products/services. Others use it as a way of maintaining social connection and deeper conversation than a tweet can provide. Still some others do it purely for fun, and enjoy broadening the diversity of their relationships.

Teams and Individuals

Individuals streaming on their own channels are a fantastic way to start entering this sphere.

What starts out as an ambitious individual striking into the world of streaming can quickly become a powerhouse for your brand. The platform could be used for showcasing wins, talking about challenges, running contests, doing demos, anything you can image.

To note: Typically individuals are streaming as themselves. They are not beholden to only talk about "company stuff" and it's important to both realize that, and embrace it.

People come to the stream for the person, the community, and the content. Not to learn about your company like it's some kind of zoom webinar. New world thinking is required.

If a team has several individuals streaming on their own, it can be helpful to collaborate together on a team channel. The way this looks is that the team channel ends up being a hub that hosts those individuals, and/or special events and guests.

Twilio and Microsoft (enumerated below) are great examples of this. However, they are only there because of the time/expense investment. Baby steps.

Measurable KPIs

As mentioned above, Twitch should be seen as a tool. Having followers is a very good thing, but it is complete vanity metrics. It just means that a subset of those people who follow "might" see a notification that you've gone live.

The more important metric is chat engagement and live viewers. You can 100% control the first one. You can subtly influence the second one.

Chris Biscardi answers this question What if nobody is watching?.

First Steps

On-screen talent, production, and moderation Content Choices Promote, Attract, and Engage Test Streams and Checklists Video Editing and Long Tail Content Required Equipment, Pre/Post Production Workflows Scenes, Guests, and keeping track of everything Schedules and Time Boxing A word about Twitch Affiliate

Some Guides/examples:

Suz Hinton's Early article on a Streamer's setup

Brent Schooley's breakdown of Twilio Signal conference stream setup

Starting from Scratch Part 1

Starting from Scratch Part 2

Chris Biscardi How to record and edit a video course

Egghead.io Instructor Screencasting technical Guide

Stephanie Eckles How to set up vscode for recording a screencast