Zero Viewers? Try These Tips!

If we’re being honest, streaming to zero viewers on a regular basis can be discouraging. While most of us had the experience of streaming to no one in the early days, there are some streamers who have been going live for years with no viewers. If you’re looking to grow your viewership quickly, try out all of these tips for best results.

Promote on Other Platforms

Even though Twitch is the biggest live streaming platform in the world, discovery can be challenging. To combat this, you should be creating content for other platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram in order to build an audience. From there, you can promote your streams and direct your viewers to your Twitch, YouTube Live, or Facebook Gaming channel. 

If you’re thinking, “But growing on other platforms is hard too,” you’ll definitely want to check out our next tip.

Find Your Community

There’s no exact formula to growing an audience on social media but there are a few best practices. One great way to gain followers is to find a community of people that have a common interest. In order to do that, you’ll need to define your target audience and you’ll most likely need to niche down.

Finding a niche of the right size is vital for growing your community. To understand the concept of niching, refer to this helpful image involving dogs:

We used dogs to explain niching because well, everyone loves dogs. But trying to appeal to all dog lovers with your social media would be difficult because the community is just too large. For example, there are countless Instagram accounts revolving around dogs and you’d need to produce pretty stellar content in order to gain a following.

Alternatively, having a niche that is too small might also fail to attract followers, though you’d likely have more success than a generic, overlarge niche. There are plenty of social media accounts that have such wacky, humorous niches that they become wildly popular with a wide variety of fans. A few accounts that come to mind are @sookieandivy on Instagram (351K followers), or poorly drawn cats on Twitter (444k followers).

One of the downsides to having a small niche though, is that the type of content you’re able to produce can be limiting. The creator of @sookieandivy can only post photos of her dogs wearing crocheted hats and the artist who runs @poorlycatdraw can only post photos of, you guessed it, poorly drawn cats. Though as a creator you can post whatever you want, successful creators will tell you that posting content outside of your wheelhouse will result in decreased engagement and maybe even some “unfollows.”

As you produce content going forward, think about your target audience and cater your content to fall within that niche. If your ideal audience is people who love corgis, every piece of content you produce should appeal to the corgi-loving community in some way. Again, you do what you like as a creator but consistent content directed towards a specific target audience has proven successful time and time again.  

Give People a Reason to Watch You

Enough with the dog references, let’s get back to talking about streaming. Finish this sentence:

“People should watch my streams because…”

Hopefully you didn’t just say, “because I’m funny” or “because I’m good at League of Legends.” Seriously, what can you give your audience as a streamer that other streamers can’t? This isn’t meant to bring you down. On the contrary, everyone has something to offer to the streaming space. What’s something special or unique that you can bring to your streams? Now’s the time to put your thinking cap on and get creative. If you give people a reason to watch you, they will.

Be Consistent

If there’s anything the viewer community loves, it’s consistency. If you stream at random intervals or frequently change the time you go live, you’re making it really hard for people to catch your streams. Instead, come up with a fixed streaming schedule and stick to it. If you can’t make a stream for whatever reason, let your community know as soon as possible via your social media channels.

That said, try to avoid canceling streams unless you absolutely must. Lots of us skip streaming days when we aren’t feeling it or don’t see a point. However, it’s the streamers who consistently show up who get results. Look at it this way, if you go live, you might gain some followers or you might not. But if you skip your live, you definitely won’t.

Tweak Your Schedule

If you’re already streaming on a consistent basis and still aren’t getting any viewers, it might be time to switch up your schedule. Experiment with changing the time you start streaming as well as how long you stream for. Most people agree that streams should be at least two hours long, with three to four hours being the ideal goal. Though it’s a good idea to try and meet these numbers, don’t do so at the expense of your health. If you want to try streaming for longer hours, be sure to include plenty of breaks for standing, stretching, and snacks. 

Pro Tip: Use Streamlabs Cloudbot to schedule your breaks. You can program Cloudbot to send a message in chat at timed intervals telling you to grab some water or stand up and stretch your legs.

Try Multistreaming

If Muhammed won’t go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Muhammed. Translation? If you’re streaming to one platform, say, Twitch, don’t expect people who watch YouTube Live to come to you. Instead, stream to all sorts of viewers, regardless of their preferred platform with multistreaming.

Creators who have a Streamlabs Ultra membership can multistream to whatever platforms they wish with a few quick clicks. If you’re currently streaming to one platform, like Twitch, and not seeing results, expand your reach by going live to YouTube, Facebook, and Trovo at the same time.

Streaming to zero viewers can be frustrating and feel defeating. Though most streamers will experience little to no views at some point in their careers, frequently having no viewers means you need to switch things up. Whether you change your content by niching down, spend some time growing on other platforms, tweak your stream schedule, or give multistreaming a try, there are lots of ways to increase your viewership. Streamlabs is proud to be with you on your content creation journey with the best tools, guides, and support.