How and When to Rebrand a Twitch Live Stream
After 10 years of streaming on Twitch, I have started to really think about rebranding my channel in an effort to gain more motivation and passion for content creation. I took a first step yesterday in asking the Twitch subreddit about the rebranding process, and a few people have already chimed in with some good advice on my post entitled "How and When to Rebrand your stream," Not only do I wish to rebrand the name and feel of my stream, but I also want to rebrand myself from being more of a reclusive individual to embracing others in group content and generally being more social as a whole. The struggle I have with this is the authenticity of my approach, as I know I am an introvert and prefer doing things solo. My resistance to technology and learning new things like YouTube editing is also getting in the way, but below I will jot down some thoughts on how I can overcome my misgivings and incorporate some of the feedback I have received recently.
My brand name Blackboa doesn't really have an interesting back story. It is a name I used when I first started streaming Albion Online, a game that started my channel and accounts for approximately 90% of my follower base. I came up with that name on a whim when I watched a boxing match of a boxer who called himself the Black Rocky Balboa, nicknamed, Blackboa, and I thought it was cool and funny. Flash forward to today where I no longer play Albion Online, I feel as though I no longer connect with that brand name in the same way I did when I built my channel and reputation in the early days of streaming. The thing is, my regulars and pretty much everyone knows me as Blackboa, so I have been having a bit of an identity crisis trying to think of an alternative that would still resonate with my long-time viewers. If I do decide to keep Blackboa as the name of the channel however, I will need to do some internal soul searching to view myself and my content differently to achieve different results.
Forming habits is part of this rebranding process, because if I want to branch out to YouTube, then I need to form the habit of doing YouTube regularly, similarly to how I built the habit of blogging regularly over the course of the last month or so. I have found that blogging has been so beneficial to my own peace of mind and has allowed me to clearly articulate the thoughts in my mind and put them to paper. If I can somehow tie the habit of blogging to creating content on YouTube, there may be a synergistic relationship between the two by cross promoting the content between both mediums. My biggest hurdle of YouTube is the editing part, and I am probably just over analyzing how difficult in can be, the typical, making mountains over molehills dilemma. One of the people in the reddit replied to my post said start slow and small, and I think the best way to do so would be to perhaps start putting some clips from my recent streams on YouTube to showcase the new direction and game I am playing, Elder Scrolls Online.
The rebrand also would have to occur across all platforms, not just twitch and YouTube, and should include multi-streaming as part of the process so that I can have my content in more places than just one. Along with this rebrand, new assets would have to be created, from logos, to emotes, banners, and sharable images that I can use across social media to reflect my new brand and identify. I know that many tools exist in order to do this cheaply, especially since AI is becoming so readily available for content creation, but I also yearn to speak with someone and form a genuine connection who can help me with hands on artistic creative skills.
In one of my next posts, I would like to do a deep dive on who I am as a streamer and what I want to bring to the table and ask the right questions in an effort to redefine what my mission and vision is for streaming. What I do know is this, that my reclusive behavior and lack of wanting to collaborate or network or even play games with others is not the way to grow a twitch following, nor is it a welcoming action to tell people who express interest in playing with me that I don't like doing so and only enjoy solo gameplay. This would be more of a soul-searching exercise, because there was a time when I loved grouping and doing stuff, but over time I lost trust and faith in people's intentions through some bad experiences and got burned out in the process. If I can heal myself and allow others into my world again, I think this would have a drastic and immediate positive impact to my streams.
For now, I plan to take the feedback I am getting from Reddit and focus on the medium of YouTube to build the habit of posting there, even if I do not rebrand the greater look and feel of the channel. Simply by adding that alone and doing it habitually will likely have a positive impact both on my stream and in my blog, something that I care for deeply. My post on reddit even garnered the attention of a software developer who is allowing me to use his web-based tool called LevLcast to help me with my rebrand. The tool acts as a personal streaming manager that analyzes past live stream VODs and makes suggestions based on the analytics. It also creates clips during moments of increased chat interaction to make it easier to identify clip worthy moments, and this will be very helpful as I start to create some content on YouTube. Looking forward to adding some habits and experiment while I go.
Until next time,
Blackboa