The Beginning of Everything

You have made it, your first extension is Live and can be installed by any broadcaster in the world. But wait, what’s now?

Surely you thinking that are thousands of streamers now looking at the extension discovery, find you extension and installing it. But you are wrong, the real work begins now! The development of an extension is one thing, the marketing of an extension the other.

To help you with the marketing of Twitch extensions, I give you here a few tips of my experiences, that I have collected over the time.

The Twitch Extension Discovery

Important: Most of the information is just personal experience and a litte bit of guesswork. These are not confirmed by Twitch.

Overview of the Twitch Extension Disvovery

The Twitch Extensions Discovery is one of the best tools that can be found as an Extension Developer. But it is also one of the most annoying tools for streamers to find new extensions. The discovery is primarily divided into the following segments: Featured, New Releases & Categories.

• Featured & New Releases: The “Featured” section in the discovery can be categories or even a single extensions. Whereby the “New Releases” contains only extensions. These two areas are each controlled by Twitch. That means there are “Staff-Picked“. As an extension developer you can interact with the marketing team of Twitch to get a featuring.
• Categories: The Categories are sorted by various extension engagement metrics to help surface the most relevant extensions to streamers. Generally, Twitch look at the number of renders an extension receives in a limited period of time and total number of viewers exposed in order to asses the overall reach from activated channels. (Source: Navi (Twitch Staff) @ TwitchDev Discord)

Why is the Discovery so annoying for Streamers? Very simple, because the Discovery does not offer the possibility to review extensions. Streamers have no way to find the perfect extension by filter bad extensions with a rating filter. Most streamers either click for hours through all categories and have to install each extension and test if it fits they needs. Or they don’t.

The trick here is this: attract attention. Make sure that your extension is attractive. Take care of appealing graphics and neat texts that explain much in advance.

Edit #1: If you have an extension that you would like to consider as Featured or New Releases, you can let Twitch know here: TwitchDev — Discovery Editorial

Using Existing Marketing Channels

To also increase the installation rates of extensions, it is also a great way to use Call To Actions & Quests for marketing. For example, the Quest ensures that the broadcaster must install the extension before they are successfully completed the onboarding:

Streamer Dashboard: A quest makes sure that he has to install the extension.

In addition, a Call To Action ensures that the broadcaster can view & install the extension with one click. It is pointed out that the extension must be installed first, before a certain action can be done:

Settings Page: The Call To Action leads directly to the store entry.

Blog’s, Social Media & Influencers

Blogs are another way to promote your extension. For example, The Emergence. This blog specializes in streaming. The target audience of this blog are streamers. As a result, the blog has a high target group of streamers that are currently expanding and want to improve their own streams.

For example, you could contact such blogs and ask them if they can write an article about your extension. Maybe they’ll do a featured article with you.

The Emergence: The 10 Best Twitch Extensions

One more way is to market your extension through social media channels. Influencer marketing (also influence marketing) is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on influential people rather than the target market as a whole on social media.

You can contact large streamers who might be interested in using your extension. Most of them have the possibility to DM or send a E-Mail to they business address. You have to show them your key elements of your extension with a pitch. Also if you get turned down because of the current small exposure you have you can always try them again after you grow a bit.

Maybe someone will twitter about your extension and you will get some likes & retweets. And thereby again new streamers, which become attentive on your extension.

I have informed my followers that I have published my extension.

Conclusion

In this article, I shown you multiple ways to marketing you extension and build new ways to generate installs for your extension. One of the key element in this process is networking, building partnerships and collecting good reviews. If somebody like your extension, then collect this and build a great list of testimonials, that you can show to the next interested.