When live streaming to an audience, it can be nerve-wracking. It’s just you and the audience and no one else to bounce off. On top of that, unlike a podcast or a video, it’s not pre-recorded and edited.
You have to entertain the audience. You have to keep them interested. For many, that is terrifying. So how do you make a personality fit for engaging an audience on your Livestream? How do you make a personality that people will easily recognise?
Today I’m going to give you some tips to help enhance your live streaming personality.
Two personality types
Most live streamers are bombastic, dramatic and funny. However, that comes with practice and working out how to make witty jokes on the fly. Someone I know once described it as improv. People typically like it when you are confident and lively. But I can already hear you through the computer screen going, ‘But I’m quieter. I don’t think I can act that way!’
And that’s fine! You can be the opposite of bombastic and dramatic. You could be soft-spoken and deadpan (that’s also funny). Remember the one thing that has bombastic dramatic and funny or quiet together, and that is confidence. As long as you act confident, it’ll be OK with the audience, no matter how you curate your personality.
Because confidence gets you a long way and can make even the quietest mouse-like person have a great live streaming personality, it makes you seem less awkward and fidgety, and people appreciate that.
What don’t you want?
This tip I’m about to provide isn’t new for people that know what they are doing. However, many are just starting their streams and have no idea what I’m about to type out.
But work out what personality you don’t want to portray. Watch other streamers, work out what aspects of their stream you like and dislike, and pick which traits you want to emulate.
You can also think about other streamers and content creators you’ve stopped watching and figure out what it was that made you stop caring/watching the content.
Practice
As I said, it takes time to build up the confidence to talk into a camera without breaking a sweat expertly. My suggestion is to get the camera up on your computer, pretend the audience and everybody talking away in the chat is in the corner. Once it’s up, then practice your intro, outro and pretend to engage with the discussion. It won’t be the same thing. However, it will get you in front of the camera and talking into it, and so when it comes to the proper live stream, you are more comfortable in front of the camera. It will make your personality (whether it’s soft or a confident one) shine and be there from the beginning, and your audience will be endeared to you quickly and will be recognisable after a couple of streams.
Engaging with chat
Now the amount you’ll engage with chat will depend on your content and what kind of content you’ll produce. Engaging with chat, you’ll talk to the audience, which will allow for two things.
First, it enables you to talk to the audience and get more comfortable with the role of live streaming and helps your audience get to know you and how you respond to things. It’s another way for the audience to see your personality and determine whether they like what they see and hear.
Secondly, if you aren’t as confident, chat gives you something to bounce off and makes everything easier. If you are not as comfortable on camera, answering questions and getting opinions from chat can give you another way to show your live streaming persona.
Make mistakes
Now when streaming, you want everything to look perfect. From the lighting to the audio, you all want it to look good. However, now and then, mistakes will happen. You have to fix them. Otherwise, viewers will get annoyed.
In the time that you can’t fix it, though, work with those mistakes. Turn the negative into the positive. Seeing how you deal with the problem and shrug it off can show off other areas of your personality. Enable you to learn how to deal with issues as you stream. Seeing a live stream have difficulties for a short while is always a little funny to an audience.
Seeing you make these mistakes also makes you seem more ordinary and relatable and makes the audience care for your content more. And see you sd more likeable.
As you can see, there are many steps you can take to work out your live streaming persona. If you can create a good personality for live streaming, it will help your audience watch you and how you develop.
Your personality will become part of your brand. It is what you will be known for by the wider population. Having a good brand can help with monetisation and further ventures of content creation so always try to create a persona/personality that is authentic otherwise it will come back to bite.
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