The power of guests, community engagement, and standing out from the crowd. These three fairly obvious pieces of advice are always guaranteed to work out if you stick to them. That’s what we’re gonna see by analyzing Samuel Etienne’s outstanding entrance in the Twitch game.
Who is Samuel Etienne?
Samuel Etienne is no stranger in France. He had a very busy career. He started as a newsreader in the Canal+ group from 1999 to 2008, before joining the France Télévision group.
In 2016, his anchorman career took a real turn as he took Julien Lepers’s seat in Question Pour Un Champion, a TV-game show where people compete against each other by answering general culture questions. Each show gathered around 1.5 million viewers.
How did he enter Twitch?
Etoiles is a french streamer and gamer before everything else: Smash Bros., Animal Crossing, Minecraft, Counter-Strike… Plenty of his streams are consecrated to playing these games, but he often takes a break from these to provide his audience another type of content he thoroughly enjoys: viewing a couple of episodes of QPUC and commenting on it, reacting with his audience.
Etoiles, already familiar with Samuel Etienne, saw an opportunity to push his concept even further and actually bring the show to life. He decided to mention him on a Tweet, asking for a discussion.
Getting spammed by Etoiles’s community overnight, Samuel was obligated to answer to the streamer. They started to discuss this crazy idea where they would co-host the show, and soon it became reality.
During the show, they both react to Samuel’s own TV game, QPUC, using as support the replays available on YouTube. They use the questions to interact with the audience and discuss the game’s themes.
Samuel Etienne came back several times as Etoiles’s guest, starting to become the new Twitch superstar he is today.
The success
Against all odds, the generational gap wasn’t that much of a problem, as they both felt comfortable with each other: they were really confident in their project. They managed to gather 45.000 viewers for the first edition.
Samuel kept on going with his social media fame: he kept wishing birthdays every day, answering most of his fans’ questions, might they be streaming-related or completely random, but always with his signature cheerfulness and incredible sense of humor. That’s what got him to become an actual celebrity amongst the streaming community in such a short amount of time. People loved him for spreading a good mood everywhere and being so quick on the Tweet-trigger.
In October 2020, Samuel and Etoiles co-hosted Question Pour Un Streamer, a twist of the original show they elaborated for the ZEvent, a french charity event that holds the world record for a Twitch charity event. The show peaked at a tremendous 220.000 viewers, gathering people of all generations around the stream to discover or re-discover the game.
On the 18th of December, Samuel Etienne finally started his own Twitch channel, hosting a Culture Night with Etoiles for its launch, before hosting his first solo stream on Monday this week, peaking at 12.000 viewers to discuss the news with his chat.
The three lessons
1) Having guests
Whether you’re a big or a small streamer, there are no better ways to increase your reach than pulling up squads with other content creators. Could it be for one night, a tournament, or more recurrently like Etoiles and Samuel are doing, it can only be positive for both your approach and your community.
Don’t hesitate to create theme events and invite as many streamers as you can, build a strong communication strategy to involve every channel, every member of every community, so it can result in something huge!
2) Engage with your community
That’s another important lesson streamers should always put to use: whether it is super small or enormous, your community is always important. In fact, it’s the very reason why you get to do what you enjoy: spread entertainment. There are multiple ways to do so: chat with them, commit to them, bond to them. You can even use a bunch of tools like Gimbl. They’ll turn into loyal members and will eventually end up talking about you to their friends and family. That’s how you build a living community.
3) Be original
Finally, and this might be the most important piece of advice here, Never be afraid of doing something different, especially on a platform that gathered more than 8.5 million active users just in December. You don’t have to copy someone’s successful recipe to achieve your goals, there are infinite ways to create quality content. You just have to find the one you enjoy the most!
Conclusion
We can definitely say that the “birthday wisher” has mastered every media in his career that is nowhere near an end: TV, Radio, social media, and now Twitch. This gives us hope about TV and Twitch’s coexistence for the future.
New streamers emerge every day, but the gaming-only streaming is behind us now. There are always new ways of entertaining your audience, Samuel Etienne showed his approach. Every streamer should consider widening his knowledge of the industry and take advantage of his personal talents and every tool that is given to him!
Everything is good to take when it comes to engaging with the audience: they’re the very reason our passion and jobs actually exist. We got to do our best to provide them the best content possible and make them feel important because they are.
