What it is: TwitchCon is a 30K attendee convention that gathers streamers and their communities to celebrate the culture of Twitch. In its 9th year, TwitchCon landed in Las Vegas for the first time– and thousands traveled from around the world to attend the 3-day convention.
Our Challenge: In recent history, Twitch has faced waves of negative sentiment from streamers and their communities amidst service and policy changes, and competitors entering the market.
With the bulk of Twitch activity happening online, this IRL (“in real life”) gathering offered the opportunity to bring to life the culture of Twitch and show how it is still the best place for streamers and their communities.
As Twitch Social, we are the first line of communication with our users and have the unique ability to shape conversation and perception by shedding the brand’s corporate polish and having a more humanized image. Knowing that, our challenge for TwitchCon became clear: give both attendees AND people watching from home a chance to be immersed in the ins and outs of TwitchCon, its programming, and featured streamers, via our social content.
Our Objective: Establish the narrative that Twitch remains the best place for streamers and their communities by building off Twitch’s brand platform “Together for Whatever” and making Twitch Social the hub for our community to come together to experience live events.
Creative Strategy: We focused our creative on two content pillars:
- Behind-the-scenes moments: adding value to viewers through exclusive access to the scene, community, and top streamers.
- Platform-first trends: tapping into pop culture, platform trends, and virality using streamers as our talent.
Our Content Phases:
- LEAD UP: (KPI: Awareness + Excitement)
- Who To Meet Slot Machine: Designed assets inspired by Vegas motifs that revealed key event info.
- UnRooolie’s LV Street Taco Tour: Collaborated with streamers to drive excitement and connect our community with the new event location.
- Run to TwitchCon Lens: Tapped into the weird and wacky on TikTok by designing a lens for fans to use on their way to the event, with Twitch’s CEO as the launch post.
- EVENT COVERAGE: (KPI: Engagement + FOMO)
- Capture Approach: We leveraged learnings and optimizations from previous event captures to secure the right balance of on-site capture & production, remote post-production, and active community management.
- Event Coverage Approach: Highlight the magic of coming “Together for Whatever” at the event. Our content brought streamers together for…
- Touching Grass – A key insight (or inside joke) of the Twitch community is that gamers need to touch grass. So, we brought an actual plot of grass to TwitchCon to give them the opportunity! The grass was our throughline across weekend coverage, and led to unplanned moments, with attendees swarming the grass to touch it.
- Playing Games – We bridged the gap between attendees and our audience at home by creating a side-scrolling AR lens game on IG. We paired this with IRL elements around the event, like coasters and floor decals containing QR codes to access the game. We captured streamers playing the game throughout the weekend to inspire further use.
- “Dealing With It” – We brought the “Deal with it” meme to life with dozens of streamers wearing a pair of TwitchCon glasses and ran a fast-compilation edit showcasing the breadth of personalities (and merch) one encounters at TwitchCon.
- “...And You’re Watching Twitch!” – As a call back to the iconic Disney Channel bumpers, we asked streamers to do their best to draw Twitch’s logo, Glitch – the results were hilarious!
- Community – During the event, we sourced questions from streamers’ communities on X and Instagram Stories and captured the streamers' responses in walk-and-talk style as they wandered through the convention.
- Irreverent Q&A – We asked streamers some wacky questions like: If you could have a Pokémon as a pet, who would it be? Give your best Mario impression. Who is your dream Cosplay character? The questions served as post-event content that demonstrated how we maximize our time with streamers when we get the opportunity to be in front of them, while still highlighting the TwitchCon experience.
- COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT / RECAP: (KPI: Sentiment)
- We had active community management during and after TwitchCon, directly chatting to users who were live tweeting/posting the event from home or on-site.
Despite fewer social channels leveraged and fewer posts than TwitchCon San Diego 2022 (TCSD22), TwitchCon Las Vegas 2023 outperformed TCSD22 in nearly every metric, with an 81% increase in average impressions, a 102% increase in total active engagements, a 30% increase in 1:1 fan engagements, and most critically, a 54% increase in average global sentiment.
TCLV23’s top-performing platform was TikTok, where we saw an increase of ~11K followers. Our top performing TikTok post to date garnered ~3.6 million views, and features Tubbo (5.2M Twitch followers) taking a bite of the grass the social team carried around and offered attendees to touch.
TwitchCon hit the global trending charts on the first two days of the convention, peaking around #6, and was the #1 trend in Las Vegas across all three days. We even earned a shoutout from “Las Vegas Locally” for our touching grass activation.
Most significantly, feedback from streamers and fans alike was overwhelmingly positive – the shared sentiment being that something was different this TwitchCon… Twitch is back.
Video for Twitch Social x TwitchCon Las Vegas 2023
