Many streamers find themselves in a situation where they're "performing for the void", essentially throwing their content out for an unknown audience that can't give immediate feedback. Fortunately, there's an alternative for streamers who want to know how their live performances are landing with an audience in real time, allowing them to adjust and adapt their broadcasts on the fly. These real-time insights can give a streamer everything from an idea of what their audience liked or disliked, to a warning sign that their audience may be growing restless.
What Are Real-Time Insights?
Essentially, anything that can be used to gauge the reactions of an audience during a live stream can be considered a real-time insight. This can range from the raw numbers showing up in the streamer's dashboard to a simple increase or decrease in chat activity.
Unlike many other metrics typically viewed post-broadcast, live analytics provides the streamer with the ability to adjust their gameplay in real-time as and when they can see fit, based on the reactions from their audience.
What Makes for a Good Real-Time Insight?
One of the most obvious real-time insights is simply a streamer's current number of viewers, but it's only useful when paired with additional context. A glance at the number of viewers isn't useful on its own, outside of giving an approximate idea of how well a stream is doing, but a look at how that number changes can be more useful. What shifts cause the number to rise or fall? Does the number tend to rise or fall at certain points in each stream? Looking at these patterns can provide a streamer with valuable information they can use to improve their performance.
Changes in Chat Activity Can Help Predict When Viewers Are Leaving
Chat messages are one of the easiest ways to get direct feedback from an audience, which makes them incredibly valuable to a streamer who wants to know how they're doing. But it also means changes in chat activity can act as an early warning for when a streamer's audience is becoming unengaged.
If a streamer sees a sudden drop in chat messages, they may be able to intervene before their audience starts to leave en masse.
Using Drop-Off Points as a Guide Can Help Streamers Pace Their Broadcasts
There are certain points in just about every stream where viewers stop paying attention to the stream and start thinking about leaving. Sometimes this happens when a streamer is doing something repetitive or has gotten stuck and has no idea what to say next, but these drop-off points can also be useful to pace a stream. By finding what points in a stream are most likely to cause a drop-off in viewership, a streamer can structure their later streams around them, using them as cues for when to slow down or stop what they're doing.
Knowing When a Streamer Has Successfully Hooked Their Audience Is Just As Important
In addition to finding out what causes a streamer's audience to disengage with the stream, it's just as important for a streamer to know when their performance has managed to engage an audience. This kind of data is useful to know both before a streamer starts planning for their next broadcast, and during one. Knowing what has proven to reliably engage an audience with a streamer's content can be incredibly valuable, allowing them to use similar ideas in later streams.
How Can the Most Useful Real-Time Insights Be Used?
Over time, the most valuable insights will reveal patterns within a streamer's broadcasts, some of which can be used to shape future ones. This can range from knowing when to make a change in a given stream to adjusting a stream's format for future broadcasts. It allows a streamer to make small tweaks that can make their streams more enjoyable in the long run.
How Can These Insights Be Balanced With Overall Stream Performance?
The insights gained from a successful stream can be a great way to plan for similar ones at a later date, but a streamer needs to have a balanced understanding of how well a stream did as a whole. This means looking at both the real-time analytics and the more long-term general performance statistics, such as average viewership and retention numbers, to get the most out of each session's performance.
Conclusion
A streamer needs to remember that real-time insights are meant to be used as guidance for how a stream is performing, rather than hard and fast rules. Viewbot.tv knows the same set of rules won't work for every streamer or every stream; what works well for one streamer or one genre may not work for another. But by using these insights and Twitch live viewer bots, a streamer can be more aware of how their content is being received, which in turn can help them to make small adjustments to their content based on what they've learned.
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