Community Management Tips: 4 Ways to Build an Engaged Community

Every streamer hopes to establish a healthy and thriving community. Growth will come easily for streamers who are able to welcome newcomers into a fanbase that will make them stay and keep supporting. However, it can be challenging to maintain once more people come in, and it’ll be harder to interact with and gain the trust of multitudes of internet strangers; thus, it’s imperative for a streamer to be able to establish a good culture within the community right from the start, so that it becomes self-policing in the future. Here are some helpful tips.

1. Enforce Your Guidelines

Harsh as it may sound, a good set of guidelines will further guide your community in terms of how to behave. Even before your fanbase grows, make sure to stay consistent with your ground rules so that in the future, your mods and community members will also start enforcing it. The trick to an effective set of guidelines is to make it clear what you do and don’t tolerate, but at the same time allow some freedom for your fanbase to joke around. Be consistent with how you treat certain people in order to set an example for everyone watching. If you automatically report a troll, then make sure to do the same with other trolls coming in.

2. Be as Welcoming as You Can

Your growth comes in the form of newbie viewers entering your stream. The more of them come in, the greater your chances of growing your community significantly. Similar to sales, it’s important for you to be able to convert these newbies into loyal members and subscribers. With the exception of obvious trolls and toxic audience members, do your best to accommodate and be warm towards newcomers. It can be challenging when there’s a lot of them coming in, but a simple “hi” or reading out their username makes a difference already. This welcoming nature will also carry over to your community, as they will also be as warm to the newcomers as you were to them.

3. Resolving Conflict

With a sea of internet strangers within your stream, all interacting at the same time, there’s bound to be some conflicts that will arise. There might be a couple of viewers who would start a verbal disagreement within the chat, which could ruin everyone’s experience. As the streamer, you have the liberty of how you would handle the situation; just make sure it’s consistent with your branding and guidelines, and the kind of culture you established in the past. If you’ve empowered your mods, they will handle the conflict themselves as you continue, but they may also leave it to you to decide if that’s how you’ve handled it before. A zero-tolerance streamer will usually kick the viewers out, but a more outspoken streamer will probably chime in and pacify them.

4. Respond to Your Chat on Stream

One of the things that separates a well-loved streamer from those who are not is that the former does their best to hold conversations with their viewers while they are on stream. Sure, it might be difficult to remember every single thing about each of your chatters, but actively taking an effort to respond to their chat and questions (for as long as these don’t violate your guidelines) will create a sense of familiarity among them which will make them watch your streams and engage with you every single time. This is most especially useful when you’re just starting out because it’s how you get your viewers to join your community but it doesn’t mean that you can already ignore them if you’ve become more well-known. It may become much harder to keep up with your chat as you get more viewers interacting with each other, but as you build a community, they will engage with each other along with you. This makes for a more fun and engaging vibe which more viewers would like to jump in on.

Handling a group of internet strangers may be difficult, but once you’ve set your guidelines and built your intended community culture, things will become easier in the long run.