Speaker 1: Did you know that if a brand new viewer types something in your chat, they are 50% more likely to return to your stream? This means giving new viewers a reason to chat or a reason to engage is crucial for growing your average viewers and creating a successful channel. I asked over 4,000 Twitch users how active they are in Twitch chat, what makes them become more active with a brand new streamer, and what makes them just lurk and or leave. You'll be amazed how little you have to do to actually make them chat and engage them. So let's cover it all today with 7 tips to increase your chat activity on Twitch. Hey, I'm LJ with StreamScheme.com. I'm also a variety streamer over at twitch.tv slash ljm underscore. There's a link in the description to that if you want to check me out. I'm actually live right now. So yes, it is crucial that you guys do everything you can to make someone use that chat box without, you know, threatening them. But there is a small warning attached to this video attached to all seven of these tips. If you focus only on your chat activity, you can actually hurt your content and hurt your potential growth. But I'll cover all that at the end. First, let me show you guys our sponsor Own.tv. You guys should know about Own.tv by now. They are your one-stop shop for all things streaming related and all things streaming resources. Not only do they have high-end animated overlay packs, alerts, sub badges, and everything else you might need, but I was talking to them recently and they said that they're focusing on creating even more unique and exciting overlays. And there's some other stuff that I can't tell you about that is going to be super exciting. If you haven't already, guys, go check out Own.tv with the link in the description. You might find your brand new overlay pack, your brand new alerts, maybe some sound alerts or anything else that you didn't even know you needed yet. If you want to support me, go and support Own.tv with the link in the description, because at the end of the day, guys, I can't make these videos without sponsors like Own.tv supporting us along the way. So first things first in this giant list of tips, the most powerful way to increase chat activity, let's get it right out of the way at the start, is, well, to already have active chatters. And I know that's not what you want to hear, but I have to get this one out of the way because it's important. And don't worry, there are tips for people with zero viewers coming up as well. There is literally nothing that is going to increase your chat activity like already having chatters. So if you're brand new and just starting out, I recommend asking a few friends to hang out in your chat and, well, have a chat with you. Not only does this boost your average viewership, but if someone new does happen to drop by, they're able to join in on an already active conversation and your friends can welcome them not just into the conversation, but into the community. The important thing to remember with this though is that the new viewer has to be able to join in. I'll talk about this more later, but essentially if the conversation is super in-depth, unrelatable or personal, and they can't join in, they'll most likely leave or simply lurk. Fostering a community that welcomes new users in and includes them in the conversation is crucial for viewer retention. And this is going to be a recurring theme throughout this video. Community culture increases chat activity. Oh, sorry, LJ, can I just quickly ask, what about Discord calls with friends and other streamers? Excellent question, LJ. Discord calls are a great way to ruin your chat activity. Every single time a streamer enters a Discord call, it tends to slow down. It's hard to balance comms and also responding to your chat. The less you respond to your chat, the less they're going to try and talk. This isn't a bad thing, it's just natural. So remember the golden rule, the reason people send messages is because they want it to be read out. They just want attention. Otherwise, they wouldn't be sending the message. Next up, let's talk about some really amazing tools to increase chat engagement that you can set up right now. One of the ways that I've increased my chat activity since day one of being a streamer is using bots such as stream elements to create timers or really fun commands that people just can't help but join in on. Stream elements timers are just the bot being told to say something on, well, a timer. For example, every 30 minutes, you can tell the bot to ask people to follow if they're enjoying the stream or tell them to try out certain commands or anything you really want to remind your chatters of on a timer. Every time my stream elements timer mentions you can follow if you're enjoying the stream, I would always get a few followers or at least just one. I'm a lot bigger now, so it's harder for users to see the timers amongst the rest of the chat, but it was a great way when I was smaller to increase engagements and followers. The second set of tools inside stream elements that I love to use are commands. I have covered these a lot for CloudBot and it is the same thing, but essentially I set up loyalty points which are different to channel points and I'll cover those as well in a second, don't worry. But if a user is in chat, they'll earn loyalty points and then they can type commands such as .gamble or .heist to use those points in chat-based games. I see huge spikes in chat activity when a heist is used because heists in particular are a group chat game, meaning everyone does it together. They all type .heist or they all type .join and then the bot runs a little custom heist story I've made up about how my chat is trying to steal my secret source collection and then some people win, they get points, others lose and it's just a lot of fun. To add to this and increase the activity, whoever has the most loyalty points at the end of the month gets a gift sub from me which incentivizes joining the heists. I have two other commands that I want to quickly show off because they are huge for increasing my chat activity but essentially one is called .IQ and the other is called .base. When someone uses these, it rolls a random number gen between 0 and 100 and then it spits back that the user is 69% based or 73% IQ which obviously isn't how IQ works but it's a lot of fun because users can not only target this for themselves but each other. They can type .IQ space at me or another chatter and it says that my IQ or the other chatter's IQ is a certain percentage. Another command that I think every single person should use to increase chat activity and also to engage new chatters is the .Whatup command. Typing this command gives the user a small rundown of what is happening on that stream and to take this a step further, I actually edited my chat rules to be much shorter and to just tell people to try typing .Whatup and I have seen a huge increase in new chatter's first message being .Whatup to which I then look back at chat and say, Oh, hey, brand new user. What up to you too? It's so good. It works so good, I promise. The command idea I actually yoinked from Stan's, another streamer, but I'm pretty sure he yoinked it from Northern Lion. The chat rules, that's all me. I've just gone a little step further. Whenever I talk about commands, I get asked the question, well, how do my users know to use it? Well, you either add it to your title or if you naturally have a few chatters using them, then Twitch chat will just be lemmings and they'll all join in and try them as well. Speaking of being active, by the way, did you know that only 20% of people who watch my videos are subscribed to the channel? If you're not subscribed, maybe go give it a little click. You can always unsubscribe later, but it really helps us out in the algorithm. If we go back to our golden rule and say that every chatter just wants attention from the streamer, then this one is going to seem very obvious to you and so obvious you're probably going to say, LJ, shut up. Nobody is stupid enough not to do that. The tip is that if someone is in your chat and they say something, just say something back, acknowledge them, say hello, ask them a question, answer their question, just reply. LJ, shut up. Nobody is dumb enough to ignore their chatters. Look, you say that, but I've gone on my alt account and I've clicked on hundreds of small streamers from the browse on Twitch, from the sidebar in the stream scheme Discord, and from the YouTube comments on this channel. I've said hello or I followed your channels and zilch has been said back to me. So many of you are just sat there, stone-faced, not commentating, not saying anything. You're just playing a game, ignoring everything that is supposed to be done to make your stream entertaining. You never even glance to see my message where I say, hey, how you doing? Or if you do glance over for some reason, you don't reply. Do you think I'm a bot saying hello? Just say hello back to me for sake. This especially shouldn't be a problem anymore because Twitch just recently added a feature called first time chatter highlights. This feature is absolutely amazing and the name kind of explains what it does, but essentially it highlights when someone is new to the stream. But before they had this tool, I had to get clever and use the old brain box in order to come up with a way to find when someone is brand new to my stream. And I did this using channel points. And I still use these channel point tools in conjunction with first time chatters. So let me run through a few that you should set up once you're an affiliate. The first one I've talked about before, but it is the say hi, I'm new here. You'll set up a channel point reward that costs around 200 channel points. It's called hi, I'm new. If someone is lurking in your stream and they've been there a little bit, they'll earn 200 channel points. Or if they follow you, they'll earn just over 200 channel points as well. When they hit that 200 channel point mark, Twitch will pop up and say, why not use this redeem? And Twitch will always pick the cheapest redeem that you can afford, which means because of how we've set it up, it'll tell them to just say hi. And if they do, then it comes up as a big highlighted message in chat so that you can reply to it and welcome in a brand new chatter. There are two other channel points that I have set up that I really like for engaging brand new chatters as well. The first one is hi, I'm a lurker. Some people wanna say hello, but they don't wanna be forced to engage. So this is a bit less daunting to say hello without the expectation of becoming a chatter. It still gets them active and it's a nice way to meet them in the middle. The second channel point that I've got set up is something that a viewer sent me a few months ago, but I'm really sorry, I can't find who it was anymore. Essentially, it's first. You make it redeemable once and you just call it first and whoever is in chat first can redeem it when the stream goes live. The internet has always loved spamming first whenever they reach a video, well, first, or in this channel's case, everyone spams hashtag early gang, which is awesome. So this really just matches that, increases activity. So I still need to go into my big warning about how by focusing too much on chat activity, you can hurt your stream, but that's gonna be at the end of the video. So if you choose to leave at any point, that's totally fine. Just skip ahead to the end and watch that because it is crucial that every creator understands how important this is. If you've ever desperately Googled how to make friends like I did as a teenager, then you've probably figured out that one of the best ways to start conversations is by using open-ended questions. Granted, we're not looking to make friends with our viewers in any way, but it's the same concept. If you have a few lurkers and you want them to be more active in chat, then asking yes or no questions is one of the worst ways to do that. I see you guys doing it all the time. You need to use open-ended questions that allow for them to elaborate on a topic they're interested in. For example, you'd say, man, I was watching a movie on the weekend and I watched my favorite movie. It was Stardust and I haven't watched it since I was a kid. What is your favorite movie from when you were a kid that just holds up today? This allows them to engage and talk about their favorite movies and you can talk about which ones you like as well. It creates a conversation. Another great way to engage chatters with open-ended questions without forcing yourself to ask them is to simply put the topic or the question in your title or as a command, such as the exclamation mark Q-O-T-D command, which stands for question of the day. If your title poses a question or sparks an emotional response from a potential viewer, they're more likely to click it and engage with you in conversation. This is why I tell you guys to stop naming your stream chill vibes. You're kind of promoting the idea of a lurker friendly place, which is great. But if you want active chatters, you want them to come in hot and be like, hey, how dare you say that coffee is better than tea. You can do this with any relatable topics, such as white chocolate is better than dark chocolate because everyone agrees that dark chocolate is trash and white chocolate is the best. Literally everyone on the planet. Here's a few more examples for you. Hey, do you guys skip cut scenes on the first playthrough? Do you guys hate side quests? Do you guys like trying on clothes when you go out clothes shopping? All of these are relatable ways to increase activity as long as you follow up on the question. Don't just get their answer, read it out and move on. You need to unravel the string. What, you guys like dark chocolate? That is crazy. It's so bitter and disgusting. Why do you like it? This is called a yes end and it's used in improv all the time. Someone says something, you say yes end and you build on it. It's literally just having a conversation. Okay, moving on. It is a fact that during a just chatting segment, you are more likely to have a faster and more active chat because remember our golden rule is if you are reading out chat messages and chatters just want attention, then they're more likely to be active. This means that if you switch from just chatting to a game, you will see a drop off in activity. This can be incredibly jarring for you and make you feel like you're a boring streamer, but it's totally normal. That said, there are a lot of games out there that I'll go over that can spark a lot of chat activity and others that can go even more quiet than just a normal switch. Games like Superliminal or Skyward Sword are puzzle games and very atmospheric as well. This means that you kind of have to focus on the game and a lot of the time chat will go very quiet and just start lurking to enjoy the content. Spoiler alert for a lot of small streamers out there who don't understand this yet, but a quiet chat doesn't mean that a streamer is boring and it doesn't mean they're viewbotting either. It just means their viewers are lurking and enjoying the content. There are a lot of games where you can add your own twist to increase your activity, such as Pokemon. If you name all of your Pokemon after your chatters, then it increases activity. You say something like, hey, who wants to be Magikarp? Suddenly you have 20 people spamming me and then you've named it after it. If the Magikarp messes up and dies later or kills something you really want to catch, then you call them out, laugh at them and everyone in chat starts tagging them as well and laughing along. It's a great community building idea. There are also games that are specifically designed to increase your chat activity, such as Words on Stream, Marbles on Stream, Gartic on Stream and mods that will take a game and allow chat to control it from your Twitch chat box. All of these games have a huge chat-based component that allow the chat to engage with the game directly and can be massive in increasing activity. And again, that also feeds back into my first tip that people will be more active if they see others already being active. To add to that, if you're looking for ideas for your Just Chatting segment to create engaging content, then I recommend looking at things like Tier Lists, Bracket Fights, Buzzfeed Quizzes and one of my all-time favorites, Google Feud. Tier Lists and Brackets are essentially ranking relatable topics into the best and the worst. Buzzfeed Quizzes are just completely dumb, but they're very fun. And Google Feud is about picking a category then trying to guess the top 10 search things under that category. These are all great, fun things to do with your chat that will increase your chat activity. For our second last tip, I wanna talk about one of the hardest ways to increase chat activity, but also one of the most effective ways. And you need to work on this from day one as a streamer, and that is your community culture. You cannot force community culture. You cannot fake community culture. It takes a huge amount of time and energy to build a community culture around chat activity. And if you misrepresent that or ignore that or try and force the chat to be a different way, well, then you'll lose your viewers. That's just a fact. By empowering and encouraging your chat, you'll see a community culture begin to spread. If people rock up early and start saying hashtag early gang, then join in, spam it, and encourage it with them. If new memes appear, even if it's a creepy gnome called Gary with two Rs instead of one, which is important, I promise, then encourage it. But most importantly, if you encourage and build a culture where your current viewers welcome new viewers in, they get excited for raids, they get excited for new subs, well, that is indispensable. That is one of the most powerful things because when someone joins, if they feel welcomed, they'll always come back. Obviously, it would be weird if someone joined and said hello and like 30 people said hi with a smiley face, like that's creepy. But just a general, hey, how you doing? Welcome in is so powerful. This is a constant process that you'll have to work on and encourage. But once you're large enough, once your community is built into that enough, it goes so far to just continually grow and become this thing that you don't even have to manage anymore. And now for the tip that is incredibly important to increase chat activity, but also it's the one you're going to not want to hear. That's right, it's the warning about how focusing on chat activity can destroy your stream. So out of the gate, I have to tell you, it isn't actually your viewer's responsibility to be active in your chat. Small streamers have a terrible habit of looking at lurkers and thinking they're a bad thing and that is so detrimental. They don't realize that not every streamer has 10,000 viewers spamming LULW over and over again. This sets themselves up to have such high expectations of how fast their chat has to be and it causes them to become very disheartened when their chat isn't at that speed. If you want an active chat, you have to produce good, quality, engaging content that makes someone want to spam LULW. Because just to reiterate, at the end of the day, the best way to create chat activity is by producing good, quality content. And to back this up, almost every single person who commented and said why they engage with a new streamer said pretty much, you just make sure you're actually doing something engaging. If you're sitting there drooling stone-faced, they're not going to engage because that isn't engaging content. That said, a slow chat does not mean you are producing bad content. Honestly, a lot of the time, it is the exact opposite. There are times where I will play a game and my chat activity will slow right down, but my average viewers will pick up and start to skyrocket in comparison. This is because people are enjoying the content and lurking and just chilling. In this situation, what do I do? Do I start asking a bunch of open-ended questions? Do I run polls? Do I go out of my way to try and engage them? No, I just have to make good, quality, entertaining content with a slow chat. Because if you take anything away from this video at all, it's that if you try and force someone to chat, they will leave. And if I can't be entertaining with a slow chat or no chat, then I can't be entertaining as a streamer when I have a chat. An important lesson that I learned and a lot of streamers who are just chatting streamers like myself learn is that if you are growing because you're reading out every single message, well then eventually, you're going to get to a point where you can't read every single message. Giant streamers can only read one or two messages here and there. They don't focus on engaging individuals. They focus on creating entertaining content for the collective that is their chat. This is also crucial to learn as a content creator because as someone who's been editing a lot of my streams lately, I've learned that the more I talk to my chat and the more I try and engage my chat, the harder it is to make an engaging or entertaining YouTube video out of that stream. I actually don't know what you guys think about this and I'd love to hear what you have to say in the comments. But personally, I will take a massive hit to my average viewers. I will also take a massive hit to my active chatters. If it means that afterwards, I can edit down a banger video that'll help me grow across multiple platforms while I'm offline and not streaming. Because at the end of the day, 6,000 chat messages or 300 unique chatters on a stream is awesome. But it doesn't help me to become a better content creator or to grow when I'm offline. The moment I hit end stream, those chatters are gone. So while it is fine to want to increase your chat activity, remember lurkers are the backbone of Twitch and the focus should always be creating good, engaging content. Speaking of, YouTube thinks that if you click this video, it'll help you grow and become a better content creator. So why not check it out and let me know if the YouTube algorithm was onto something. I'll see you guys next week.