Ok, excuse the slightly click-baity title.
Pointless? Really? Well, not exactly. They are of course, kind gestures of support from one streamer to another. But how would one choose to measure the effectiveness of such a gesture? It would be surely linked to the number of new followers that a shoutout generates, right?
And herein lies the problem. A regular shoutout doesn’t really do anything. If a shoutout is automatically given to every other streamer in chat, it becomes a little meaningless and lacks any analysis or sincerity. The result? Nobody goes to follow the streamer being shouted out.
How to do better shoutouts?
I think there’s a better way, but it does involve being a little bit more selective and taking a little more time over it, but your shoutouts will be far more sincere and engaging as a result.
Ready?
I first discovered this through a fellow music streamer, the wonderful MacCrimmin.
As I was watching his stream, he was kind enough to give me a shoutout and to my surprise, a clip of me appeared on his screen, singing a Ryan Adams song. Fortunately for me, it was a good clip and it resulted in a few follows. Always being someone who enjoys dabbling with the tech side of things, I was intrigued!
It turns out that the overlay was from a third party developer called Twitch Guru. They offer a free version and a paid version of the shoutout player, amongst other tools, so worth a look.
It’s easy enough to install, and add it as a browser source in OBS. I found that by cropping the edges (hold Alt and drag the borders in) I could get it to look how I wanted it to look, and it’s helpful to be able to limit the clips to say, just 20 seconds or so.
However, I did find something limiting in that the regular shoutout command !so would always trigger the clip player. This caused one of my live songs to derail once, after one of my mods triggered a regular shoutout, and smack in the middle of me playing live, a clip of another streamer started playing and I just had to stop. Obviously, not something that you’d want to happen.
Apparently, you need the paid version of that tool, in order to specify what terms will and will not trigger the clip player. Ok, fair enough.
But then I discovered Clippy!
Use Clippy for more genuine Twitch shoutouts.
Head over to https://efuse.gg/clippy
In my view, this is a cleaner way to do the video shoutout thing, and you can specify the trigger command even on the free version.
I also found that it didn’t need cropping in OBS. Just resize it and position it to your liking, and it’s good to go.
The only downside? It’s not possible to specify a maximum length for the clips. It just plays the entire clip so if it randomly selects a long clip, you’re going to have to watch the whole thing or manually disable the overlay to cut it off.
What do you think? Would this help to make shoutouts more genuine or more effective?
Share your thoughts in the comments!
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