Who's the Boss

The typical mindset that's advised towards casters is based primarily on the craft. It's the part of your stream that you can fully control: the quality of your video and audio, the substance of your game choice, the style of your gameplay, the overall atmosphere of your brand. Less focus is put on the viewer because they're uncontrollable: they have so many different tastes and behaviors that you can't satisfy everybody. Especially with how many other casts go live everyday, it's common knowledge that most of the new viewers you get may never be seen in your channel again.

But while planning towards such an unpredictable audience makes streaming significantly more complicated than the traditional approach, especially once it grows large enough that it carries a vast amount of diversity, neglecting it makes you miss out on thousands of opportunities for potential loyal fans.

It helps to picture it in a marketing sense: how are you going to hook people into your brand if you don't give them an exceptional experience? It's a lot like the gaming industry: how are you going to get your platformer funded on kickstarter if it doesn't particularly draw interest from anybody? It might do the same things other games like it do, but if its values aren't presented well, people are going to pick the more appealing alternatives.

• So how can you appeal to an audience when their tastes change drastically depending on the games? 
• How can you change up your content while not isolating the audience you already have?
• How can you keep your personal brand steady when you have to re-position your cast for growth?

The answers lie in knowing your current audience, trying to understand your newer audience, and bridging the gap as well as you can with your brand.

Current Audience

First and most important is knowing why your current audience enjoys watching you. If you can figure out what qualities of your cast that appeal most to your regular viewers, keep building on them! These are the strongest components of your brand, what make you stand out from the other thousands of streamers live at the same time. If you keep consistent with those factors, your regular viewers will always enjoy your content. They might drift away if they dislike or don't want to be spoiled by a game, but they're the viewers most likely to come back and watch again.

New Audiences

New audiences can be tricky to strategize for because only a fraction of them will have interest in watching your cast beyond their favorite games. Lots of games have fanbases that will only watch for the gameplay, and sometimes they're overzealous with lore talk that it drives other viewers away. Because of this, it might not be best to fully appeal to new audiences, but if you can get just a few of them to enjoy your brand, you never know if they'll become one of those loyal regular viewers.

Bridging the Gap

The simplest way to tie together new audiences with the brand that your current viewers enjoy is to see where you can blend the game and your brand together. If you focus too much on the game, you'll isolate your current viewers. If you focus too much on your old traditions, you might not connect with the new viewers. But finding a balance not only makes your cast appealing to both viewers, but it also creates a more unique experience than a standard playthrough, 

There are so many things you can do to implement your brand into any gaming experience. You can make graphics, like a flashy overlay or alert notifications, that are relevant to what you're playing. You can come up with a unique theme or purpose for the game that incorporates elements from your channel, like a special marathon cast. And of course, there's more innovative things you can do, from skits to musical numbers. The more elements of your brand that you add to a gaming experience, the stronger of an impression you make on everyone who's watching.

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While your style of casting is never going to please everybody, understanding what regulars enjoy about your channel and learning how you can balance it to appeal to newcomers are important pieces to the viewer experience. With so many alternative viewing options, being able to both spark and sustain interest with your audience is a great advantage to have in the competitive world of Twitch.