Cross-Platform Wars: 3 Ways To Make Multiple Platforms Work For You

In our last article, we found what platform would most likely be a good home for us. But just because we picked a primary platform doesn’t mean we can’t utilize the other platforms! Playing around with cross-platform strategies can help us do three big things: it helps us explore new horizons, diversify our viewer base, and build our primary platform’s viewership via cross-promotion. Let’s take a look at how we can use these three elements in our cross-platform strategy.

While it’s always prudent to pick a focus early on, it doesn’t mean that we have to lock it down to that channel, especially early on. One popular technique a lot of streamers use early on is known as multicasting or restreaming. This technique is a great way to push your broadcast to multiple platforms at once. Two popular services for this are Streamlabs and Restream. From these platforms, you can try your hand at multiple platforms at the same time, such as Youtube, Facebook, and Twitch, down to newer and more obscure platforms, such as Trovo, Mobcrush, and MLG. This allows you the chance to try multiple platforms, and see if you find a natural home on one of them.

One of the most dangerous things we can do as content creators is to keep all of our content presence and audience to only one platform. Community admin Joe told us that after watching the volatile content platform market in 2019, his team at BIGBITEMedia decided to diversify. In addition to their existing YouTube channel, they began actively streaming to Twitch, Mixer, and Caffeine in early 2020. Not 6 months later, Microsoft announced that they would be sunsetting the Mixer platform. Many of his friends were on that platform, and now, without an audience elsewhere, they had to completely rebuild. Joe said that they are continuing to create content cross-platform to keep viewerbases up, maintaining their YouTube and Twitch presences, and recently adding a presence on TikTok. That way, should one of those platforms die off, they will have an audience somewhere else to start with.

In the retail world, there is a concept known as Omnichannel Retail, where the goal is to meet your customer wherever they are, be it in-store, online, in-app, or even over the phone. We can apply the same concept to content creation. Now, ideas for cross promotion can be so diverse, depending on your circumstance, that we will probably do an entire series on the topic, but to give you at least an idea, let’s look at an example. A Twitch streamer could upload full streams or highlight reels to YouTube. They can edit their funniest clips and put them on TikTok. They can put some of this media, or other promotional materials on Facebook and Twitter. I could keep going on, but the point is, no matter what your home platform is, you can benefit from getting your voice out there on other platforms, if for no other reason than to use it to advertise your main platform.

Now, there is one important note to take into consideration here. Certain platforms, once you are able to monetize on their platforms, sometimes have an exclusivity clause. Probably the best known one here is Twitch. For all Twitch Affiliates and Twitch Partners, the platform owns exclusivity rights to all content released on their platform for the first 24 hours. This means no multicasting, and that you have to wait a day to post any clips to TikTok or highlight reels to YouTube or Facebook. If you have any sort of monetization agreement with any platform in play, make sure you read the terms and conditions, so you don’t end up getting yourself in hot water!

Now that we’ve talked about finding our home platforms, we’ve learned how a solid cross-platform strategy can help us. That strategy can include restreaming to multiple platforms, diversifying your viewerbase, and cross-promoting on other platforms. As always, don’t forget to stay tuned for more tips and tricks, and don’t forget to join our discord! You can find the link at nerdsbelonghere.com.