How do you increase viewer retention? Best ways to grow your stream

When growing and building any product or Brand Retention is one of the most important factors to making real growth.

The reason being is the simple principle of the "Leaky bucket" and applies perfectly to growing as a small streamer.

If you're able to attract more viewers to your stream but you're not able to retain any of them as long term viewers you have a leaky bucket. For instance if you get 5 new viewers from a Tiktok video and two of them follow you but only one of them tunes in the next stream you have a leaky bucket.

But If you can increase the % of people that view your stream and stick around you will start seeing REAL growth!

How do you Increase retention of viewers?

Get Viewers to Chat!

In Twitch's blog post about Viewer retention they said "Viewers who chat in their first visit are 50% more likely to come back to that channel!". It's never good to call out a lurker but there are some easy ways to get people to feel comfortable to chat back with you!

• Ask chat specific questions about a subject you think they have an opinion about ie. A trending TV show, a large content creator in your category, trending news
• Share your opinion about a topic / controversy! (We recommend doing this in your prep before stream and outline topics you can discuss)

Educate your viewers

A great way to engage viewers is provide specific insight into a game or topic. Coming prepared with a list of topics that your viewers would be interested in learning about will show how much you care about them as well as clearly show the value they can get from tuning into your stream.

We even see an increase in retention as streamers make a conscious effort to explain their thought process on different decisions they are making within the game. You don't have to be the best player in the game to provide value to viewers. They may even engage with you to share their own tips on how which once again leads them to chat which increases retention!